Western Digital’s big plans to tackle the world’s ballooning storage demands

Western Digital has unveiled its plans to address the demands of the storage market, from surveillance-focused hard drives, to gaming SSDs.

The solid-state drive (SSD) market is growing exponentially, the company said, as the hardware is applicable across countless different devices and scenarios.

WD has addressed the growing SSD market by acquiring SanDisk, which is set to broaden the scope of its storage solutions.

The company has not yet confirmed how it will integrate SanDisk into WD, and whether it will launch a new range of WD-branded SSDs.

Despite the steadily increasing demand for bigger PC storage capacity, most of the storage market exists outside the realm of personal computing.

Rapidly growing storage demands

Storage is a major factor across various sectors — including security, mobile, and cloud storage.

WD said that there are 350 million photos uploaded to Facebook on a daily basis, along with 144,000 hours of video uploaded to YouTube.

Since 2008, there have been more devices connected to the internet than people on the planet.

The global demand for storage solutions is increasing at an alarming rate, with the average household in 2016 using 3.3TB of storage capacity.

In addition to personal storage, the percentage of data stored in the cloud has increased to 36% in 2016 from 7% in 2011.

WD said that it plans to cater for globally increasing storage demands by providing consumers with a variety of specialised products designed for reliability and expanding into new markets via its recent acquisition.