"In an ironic twist, the earthquake disaster in Japan had the effect of stimulating the storage market, as manufacturers accelerated orders and increased inventory to ensure adequate supply," said Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS. "The effect was felt most in the HDD space, the largest storage segment, resulting in higher HDD shipments."
IHS noted that HDD manufacturers, especially WD and Seagate, are dealing with painful margin declines that are caused by increased competition that contributed to price erosion as well as increasing costs from R&D targeted at next-generation hard drive technologies.
In the ODD market, IHS said that some manufacturers have begun abandoning DVD-ROM and Blu-ray devices due to an "ongoing transition" from local disc-storage to streaming media. SSDs are expected to become more popular and "pick up more steam with the recent debut of consumer NAND caching technology from Intel," IHS said.
