According to an August 2013 report from IDC, the global personal and entry-level storage (PELS) market grew by 11.7% year-on-year in Q2 2013. Personal storage refers to individual hard disk drives, while entry-level storage refers to multi-drive solutions, such as network attached storage (NAS) enclosures.<\/p>\n
This HDD market growth is despite a general decline in the desktop PC market<\/a>, which has shrunk 2.5% year-on-year in Q2 2013.<\/p>\n According to IDC, the 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch HDD form factors each saw units shipped increase 2.7% and 13.4% year over year, respectively. However, 3.5-inch continues to give way to the more portable 2.5-inch form factor, with 3.5-inch losing 1.8% share year over year.<\/p>\n Speaking to MyGaming, Western Digital (WD) South Africa components sales manager,\u00a0Kalvin Subbadu said that their components division has shown growth exceeding 12% over the past six months despite the decrease in PC Sales in SA.<\/p>\n “Around 85% of the total drives sold in SA are 3.5-inch versions,” said Subbadu. “At the moment the most popular capacity in SA is the 500GB 3.5-inch drive, but we foresee the trend moving towards the 1TB capacity.”<\/p>\n According to IDC, users continue to migrate to higher capacity drives to meet storage needs. In the 3.5-inch personal storage market, 2 terabyte (TB) devices represented 51.9% of unit shipments in the quarter. For the 2.5-inch personal storage market, 1TB devices captured 51.7% market share.<\/p>\n For the entry-level market, capacity ranges are more varied due to multiple bays and vendors’ ability to partially populate devices. However 4TB devices hold the most market share with 28.6% of units shipped, said IDC.<\/p>\n “The need for more capacity is also apparent in the SA market and with the uptake of small to medium NAS devices, augmenting our WD Red hard drive range with a 4TB makes sense,” said Subbadu. “As consumers download more and more digital content and small to medium businesses struggle with the exponential increase of data, the 4TB WD Red drive [can be used in a] in a 5-bay NAS solution [for a] total of 20TB of data.”<\/p>\n “Furthermore, with NAS vendors now manufacturing smaller form factor NAS enclosures, this highlighted the demand for a 2.5-inch WD Red hard drive. The market is poised for significant growth in this sector and according to IDC, the [2.5-inch] form factor NAS opportunity is expected to grow by 147% from 2013 to 2014. WD is ideally positioned for this growth with the introduction of its WD Red 2.5-inch format,\u201d said Subbadu.<\/p>\n According to IDC, USB continues to be the interface of choice for the PELS market, growing units shipped 11.5% year over year. Ethernet also saw strong shipment growth, posting a 10.2% year over year growth rate and being the interface of choice for the entry-level market. Thunderbolt continues to ramp up, posting a year-over-year shipment growth rate of 411.7%, albeit off a very small base.<\/p>\n PC market declines, but AMD and Intel go strong<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n AMD turns from PC to lucrative console market<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\nMore hardware news<\/h3>\n