Has Europe finally passed Peak Disk?

Disk drive sales in the EMEA region have showed falls in both units and capacity according to research from Futuresource Consulting. HDD unit sales peaked in 2010 at 28.06 million units, falling to 25.91 million in 2011 and 21.48 million in 2012, a 17 per cent decrease between the latter two years. Mats Larsson, a senior …

[Graham 24]

Numbers seem far too small

"Total capacity shipped peaked in 2011 at 25.4PB"

Isn't that the equivalent of just 8,500 3TB drives? Seems a really small number for all of EMEA.

[Christoph]

Something wrong there

"23.6PB in 2012"

That can't be right. That would mean that the 3TB drive I bought last year was over a ten-thousandth of the total capacity shipped. There were several of that model sitting on the shelf in the one store. And a production run of only ten thousand even of that one model doesn't sound very economic.

[goats in pajamas]

Economics

And a Europe wide trashed economy, widespread uncertainty and record unemployment have nothing whatsoever to do with sales figures?

[fronty]

Maybe SSDs are having an impact too?

More laptops/ultrabooks are shipping with SSDs now too, maybe we are seeing the beginning of the end of the traditional mechanical drive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Maybe SSDs are having an impact too?

My assumption has always been that eventually the HDD will become a niche for people who want large amounts of storage without a remortgage for SSD arrays. SSD's will probably take over from HDD's for smaller storage eventually but end up unable to compete against HDD's on cost for mass file storage.

[irm]

I paid £54 for a 2TB Samsung drive in the February or March before the floods. As far as I can tell, you still can't get that capacity for that sort price, so maybe that's why people simply aren't buying.

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely. I'm refusing to buy more hard drives until they come back to a reasonable price, and I know I am not the only one. To that you have to add the current economic climate and it's no wonder.

[pPPPP]

Me too. Although external drives don't appear to have been hit so much, to the extent that it's cheaper to buy a drive in an enclosure than to buy the drive on its own.

In the enterprise, compression and thin provisioning are reducing the total number of drives sold, as are SSDs and automated tiering. Few people buy drawers of 15K drives and short stroke them when compared to just a few years back.

[Anonymous Coward]

they're sitting it out

because all of you, WILL need a new drive, sooner or later. So you're holding your breath, holding off the next purchase, until the price drops. But how long can you hold off? It's been what, 1.5 year since the flooding (and price hike). Perhaps "they" are hoping you blink (or faint), and pay their "asking" price.

[pixl97]

Larger isn't better.

The vast majority of the computers I work on have somewhere below 150GB of data. Seemingly there aren't a huge number of people out there making TB's of video and media. On top of that, the people with desktops are keeping them much longer. A 5 year old desktop is still pretty fast.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Larger isn't better.

Maybe the people you provide service for don't know their arse from their elbow and couldn't tell the difference between a solid state disk and a super star destroyer if it was parked in orbit around the fourth moon of Endor? Someone is buying them even if you don't see them.

[Julian Bond]

So where's my 1Tb iPod Classic? Oh. Sorry. Wrong thread.