Hard disk drive manufacturers are seeing new growth in sales due to the increase in digital devices in the home, according to researchers.
Consumers are turning to hard disks to store their digital photographs and video, and this has led to an 80-percent increase in the number of hard disks in consumer products from 9.3 million units last year to about 16.7 million units this year, research firm In-Stat/MDR reported yesterday.
New products that have hard disks built into them include personal video recorders like the TiVo set-top box that can store up to 80 hours of recorded television programs, DVD recorders, video game consoles and portable MP3 music players.
"As the PC market, which represents the bulk of hard drive shipments, has matured, there has been an increased emphasis by storage manufacturers to address, and even formulate, specific strategies to address the consumer electronics (CE) market," says Cindy Wolf, an analyst with In-Stat/MDR.
And there are opportunities in many new areas, Wolf said.
"There are a number of emerging markets which will also represent significant opportunities for storage providers in the coming years, including PDAs/handheld PCs, portable audio/video players, televisions and digital camcorders."
Users prefer hard disks as they do not need to buy extra disks or cassettes that can then be lost or damaged, one expert said.
"People with digital video recorders love the fact they don't have to do anything," said Mark Jackson, an engineer at US-based disk drive firm Maxtor Corp.
They are also buying new standalone drives as the built-in drives they have are filling up fast, added Jackson's colleague Richard Jorgensen, a marketing director at Maxtor.
Jorgensen was in town to deliver a speech at VIA Technologies Inc's (
But some users may not want to change their habit of storing music and video on compact disks and DVDs.
"With some products like the TiVo users can see where their recordings are stored physically," Erik Hermanson, a marketing manager at digital video-editing software developer Cyberlink Corp (訊連科技), said earlier this week at Computex Taipei.
"Recording onto a [removable] disk is more familiar and allows you to lend the disk to friends, for example," he said.
Sales of standalone, or external, drives are outpacing built-in or internal drives, another research firm reported last week. In the Asia-Pacific region, the value of external disk storage shipments increased by 10.1 percent to US$386.9 million in the second quarter of this year from the first quarter, according to US-based International Data Corp (IDC).
Internal disk storage systems increased by just 3.2 percent to US$143.6 million during the same period.
"This is consistent with long-term trends which see users migrate from using internal disk storage systems to using external disk storage systems," the IDC report said.
Last year, Taiwan purchased US$124 million worth of external storage equipment, according to statistics from Gartner Inc.
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