Coughlin Associates said the combination of industry consolidation and Thailand-related shortages, will result in higher HDD prices at least until 2014. The higher prices, however, will help fund expensive new technology transitions by 2015 or 2016 and increase areal density growth rates by 40%.
The annual rate at which hard disk drive areal densities increase has slowed in recent years, Coughlin Associates said.
However, drive capacities continue to grow due to technology advancements such as Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). While hard drive areal density growth has slowed, storage capacities continue to rise: 3.5-in. HDDs with storage capacities of 12TB and 2.5-in. HDDs with 6 B are expected by 2016.
Because of slower areal density growth, user companies will have to spend more per gigabyte of drive capacity over the next two years. The average hard drive capital equipment spending per year between 2008 and 2016 is estimated at about 7.2% of hard drive industry revenue.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com .
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