Hard Drive Market Set To Decline Significantly In 2013

Market research firm iSuppli recently reported that revenue in the hard drive market is expected to decline in double-digit percentage during 2013. The research firm says that the decline of the hard drive market is thanks to significant increases in the number of tablets, smartphones, and SSDs that have been chipping away at the market share for the traditional hard drive. iSuppli predicts that revenue will decline to $32.7 billion for 2013.

While it is still a significant amount of money to be made in the market, that represents an 11.8% decline from the $37.1 billion earned in the market last year. The research firm also predicts that revenue in the HDD field will remain flat throughout 2014 declining slightly to $32 billion. With a decline in overall revenue, a gross and operating margin decline is also predicted.

Analysts for the company do expect hard drives to remain the dominant form of storage in 2013 thanks to an expected increase in demand for ultrabooks and increased hard drive demand for business use. Hard drives are expected to remain the dominant form of storage based on their cost advantage compared to an SSD. Currently hard drives are significantly cheaper than comparably sized SSDs.

One of the big growth areas for hard drives is expected to be in the business sector including the enterprise space, cloud storage, big data, and the big-data analytics markets. iSuppli also mentioned that towards the end of Q4 2013 Western Digital is expected to launch a five-terabyte Helium drive specifically designed for data centers and enterprise storage applications that will be popular.

[via iSuppli]