Windows 7: Hard disk drive shipments to soar through 2014

Despite historical declines in sales last year and the onslaught of solid state drives, hard disk drive shipments are expected to soar through 2014, representing 300,000 petabytes of capacity, according to a new study released by market research firm IDC.

The study, Worldwide Hard Disk Drive 2010-2014 Forecast, estimates that hard disk drive purchases for use in enterprise-class applications will increase by more than 12 million units by 2014, or from 40.5 million in 2009 to 52.6 million.

Additionally, the total amount of capacity on hard drives shipping in the next two years will be more than the amount the industry shipped over the past 20 years, IDC said.


IDC said a growing interest by enterprise-class companies in new storage delivery models, such as storage as a service or in the cloud, will place greater demands on Internet data centers.
The research firm also said the price per gigabyte of performance-optimized HDD storage will continue to decline at a rate of approximately 25% to 30% per year, and that the industry's transition from 3.5-in. to 2.5-in. performance drives will be completed by 2012.