SANTA CLARA, Calif.–Executives from seven of the disk-drive industry’s most prominent manufacturers looked into their crystal balls Wednesday at the DISKCON USA conference and offered up a mostly optimistic near-term forecast for the rejuvenated storage device market.
No longer solely dependant on the PC market for its drives, demand for mobile devices, DVRs and digital cameras has leading vendors like Seagate, Western Digital and Maxtor—along with Japanese competitors Hitachi GST and Fujitsu—enjoying the better end of the supply-and-demand cycle.
At least for now.
“Everyone’s in a pretty up mood right now,” John Monroe, an analyst at Gartner, said in an interview with InternetNews.com. “Everything looks great right now but my advice to vendors is beware the Ides of March because they may come in December.”
Monroe predicts total disk-drive sales will check in between 127 million units and 130 million units in the third quarter and inch upwards to between 130 million units and 133 million units in the fourth quarter of this year.
“The challenge is come up with something that will continue this growth rate,” he said. “One thing that could help prolong this trend is that Western Digital and Seagate, the two largest vendors, are building with a great deal of caution with this burgeoning demand.”
Rich Rutledge, senior vice president of marketing at Western Digital, said storage vendors are benefiting from the explosion of mobile devices and declining prices for devices that require a significant amount of personal storage.
“We’ve been riding the computing platform for a long time,” he said. “But the external drive market is past 30 million units now and continues to go up. The video set-top box market also had more than 30 million units of the 500 million units that will be shipped this year.”
But designing the next generation of drives to meet and, in some cases, create demand for vendors in the future will largely depend on just how much writing and reading capacitycan be crammed onto increasingly smaller and more energy-efficient drives.
This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.
RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS
- Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality
FEATURE | By James Maguire,
December 16, 2020 - AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
December 11, 2020 - Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
December 04, 2020 - Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 18, 2020 - Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
November 10, 2020 - Top 10 AIOps Companies
FEATURE | By Samuel Greengard,
November 05, 2020 - What is Text Analysis?
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 02, 2020 - How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 29, 2020 - Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 23, 2020 - The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
October 16, 2020 - Top 10 Chatbot Platforms
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
October 07, 2020 - Finding a Career Path in AI
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
October 05, 2020 - CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
September 25, 2020 - Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 25, 2020 - Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
September 22, 2020 - NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
September 18, 2020 - Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 14, 2020 - Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 13, 2020 - IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 11, 2020 - Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality
FEATURE | By James Maguire,
September 09, 2020