Stefan Mileschin

HHD sales will take a canning this year as SSDs boom, according to beancounters at iSuppli.

iSuppli claims that HDD revenue is set to drop to about $32.7 billion this year, down 11.8 percent from $37.1 billion last year.

HDD revenue will be flat the following year, amounting to $32 billion in 2014, iSuppli said.

HDDs shipments dropped from 659.7 million in 2010 to 626.3 million in 2011 to 578.1 million in 2012.

Fang Zhang, an analyst for storage systems at iSuppli, said that the HDD industry will face lots of challenges in 2013.

Shipments for desktop PCs will slip, while notebook sales are under pressure as consumers continue to spend on smartphones and tablets. The declining price of SSDs will also allow them to take away some share from conventional HDDs, Zhang said.

All that being said, HDDs will continue to be the dominant form of storage this year, especially as demand for Ultrabooks picks up and hard drives remain essential in business computing, Zhang's report said.

HDDs are still as cheap as chips, particularly when higher densities are involved and dollars per gigabyte are calculated, he said.

He expects the average selling price for HDDs to decline a further seven percent this year.

On average, HDD prices have dropped from 50 cents per gigabyte of capacity in 2007 to 10 cents per gig in 2012, according to Zhang. SSD prices have dropped from $8.79 per gigabyte of capacity in 2007 to $1 in 2012, the report said.

While it is still too early to see the SSD price in 2013, it will be down, Zhang claimed.

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