Hard Drive Revenue About To Take a Double-Digit Dip

Lucas123 writes "Ultrathin notebooks, smart phones and SSDs are all putting pressure on the hard drive market, which is set to take an almost 12% revenue loss this year, according to a new report from IHS iSuppli. Hard drive market revenue is set to drop to about $32.7 billion this year, down 11.8% from $37.1 billion last year. At the same time, In what appears to be a grim scenario, the optical disk drive industry is expected to encounter continued challenges this year, and optical drives could eventually be abandoned by PC makers altogether."

Re:Less demand

[Khyber]

"or at least stop going down ignoring the effect of the Taiwanese floods."

You could at least get the country right. It's Thailand, not Taiwan.

Re:Where are the hybrids???

[moonwatcher2001]

In the new iMacs.

Re:Less demand

[second_coming]

In comparison with what PC hardware used to cost, they are extremely cheap at the moment.

My first PC in 1992 cost me £1400.

Re:Less demand

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

That is just the price history of one model in one country. In the US, I scooped up eight 3TB external drives off the shelf of Target after the price-gouging started because Target was slow to catch up with the online gougers. They were $99 each. Yes, $99 for a 3TB external drive at a regular brick and mortar department store,, not on sale. The 2TB drives were $79.

Re:Less demand

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

For a hint of where the market for spinning drives is going, look at DLP.

For anyone else going WTF do projectors and televisions have to do with storage, he's actually talking about DLT - Digital Linear Tape which is the marketing name of the Quantum tape product originally developed by DEC. The competing format is LTO (Linear Tape-Open) which basically killed DLT circa 2005. HP, IBM and eventually even Quantum (after acquiring Seagate's tape division) make LTO products.

Re:Where are the hybrids???

[k3vlar]

Apple doesn't have 3tb hybrid drives... theirs is a software solution. They include a 128gb off-the-shelf(-ish) SSD, and a 3TB platter-based hard drive. Their volume manager software "intelligently" shuffles data around, to optimize access speeds. Not sure how effective it is, but it sure sounds appealing in their advertising material.

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