Despite a poor second-quarter earnings performance from leading Hard Disk Drive (HDD) supplier Seagate Technology, the overall HDD industry is continuing to thrive in 2008 due to an insatiable demand for low-cost, high-capacity storage devices, according to iSuppli.
"Unlike the NAND flash chip industry, HDD vendors have been able to resist the worst impacts of the economic slowdown by learning how to control their costs," said Krishna Chander, senior analyst for storage systems at iSuppli. "The industry also has been aided by increased demand for more storage in PCs – as new applications demand increasingly larger-capacity HDDs. As long as demand for low-cost storage capacity keeps rising, the HDD industry will find ways to deliver."