Seagate Technology leads a thriving hard-disk drive (HDD) industry, driven by demand for low-cost, high-capacity storage devices, according to analyst iSuppli. Unlike the Nand flash chip industry, HDD vendors resisted the worst of the economic slowdown by learning to control their costs, argued Krishna Chander, senior analyst for storage systems at iSuppli.
The industry also got lucky with rising demand for more storage in PCs because new applications call for more HDD capacity. The threat of solid-state disk has not materialised yet, as HDD offers a cheap practical answer to today"s challenges, i-Suppli added. "Provided demand for low-cost storage capacity keeps rising, the HDD industry will find ways to deliver," said Chander. In the first quarter of 2008, HDD vendors shipped 137 million units, up 21 per cent year on year.