IDC: Strong Demand Drives EMEA Disk Market

LONDON -- Driven by continued strong demand for high-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) in the PC market and for external hard drives and enterprise external arrays, plus the additional demand from set-top boxes and automotive applications, EMEA HDD unit shipments grew 18.8% to 27.3 million drives in the second quarter of 2008 compared with the same quarter last year, according to new data from IDC.

Mobile-class drives (drives aimed at small form factors such as notebooks and consumer devices) continued to drive overall market growth at over 51% year on year to 6.1 million units, while enterprise-class drives (premium drives destined for high-end disk arrays) grew 22.5% year on year to 2.6 million units. The largest segment in desktop-class drives grew 10.5% year on year to 18.5 million.

"While the overall economic environment has become more troubled, the HDD market showed continued resilience, primarily due to strong demand from the technology segments," said Claus Egge, program director for IDC's EMEA HDD research. "The PC and external disk array markets have continued strong unit consumption fueled by demand from both businesses and consumers. At the same time the growth of external HDD drives and specialist automotive applications as well as the almost insatiable demand for higher storage capacities in all customer segments have been the foundation of strong 2008 growth."

IDC