Digital Content Explosion Fuels Demand for High Capacity HDDs

The current era of digital content explosion has been spurring growing demand for greater digital data storage space among content hungry consumers, and the thriving hard disk drive (HDD) market has resulted in increasing affordability. GfK Asia findings show that cost per gigabyte (GB) in the Asian region shredded between 23 to 40 percent within the last two years, with the price decline steeper in mature economies such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea, compared to emerging countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam (Figure 1).


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The recent years have seen growth spurts in sales of higher capacity disk drives—a clear indication of consumers’ insatiable appetite for digital storage space. GfK Asia’s IT retail panel in Asia revealed that consumers in the region spent close to $103 million on some 908,000 units of 1TB HDDs in the last two years, translating to an average cost of $113 per 1TB.

Reports also showed that mature economies tend to grow at a faster rate, registering a seven fold (765 percent) increase in sales of 500GB storage disk in a matter of just two years, while sales of 750GB capacity ones grew 13 percent in the last year alone (Figure 2).


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“Since making its entrance into the market in the first half of 2007, 1TB hard disk drives have also been showing marked improvement in sales, having grown significantly by 30 percent within the last quarter (Apr – Jun10) despite its considerably high selling price which averaged USD148,” observed Gerard Tan, Regional Account Director for IT at GfK Asia. “A 1TB hard disk offers endless possibilities in digital content storage as it would mean having convenient access to more than 700 days of non-stop music, approximately 300,000 high resolution digital photos, or 250 DVD films.”

“Notebooks and netbooks nowadays are getting smaller, if not thinner; and emphasis is placed on greater performance. Given the relatively small dimension; the typical internal 2.5in HDD is hardpressed for space allocation; and as such, consumers often have a secondary external storage as a standby,” said Tan.

Consumers in maturing countries such as Taiwan are seen to be snapping up external high capacity HDDs, and 3.5in 1TB and above storage capacity is the fastest growing segment which registered 567 percent growth in sales when comparing year-on-year findings. In emerging economies, cost per gigabyte have dropped by over a fifth (23 percent) in two years, and this brought about a corresponding 65 percent hike in sales during this period of time. Sales of 500GB storage drives grew almost 545 percent in two years, while that of 750GB in size increased by 48 percent.

“With the latest developments in the constantly evolving PC market and Internet environment, such as introduction of the new iPad, higher broadband speeds, greater access to Wi-Fi zones, coupled with existing compression modes—from imaging to audio-visual, and users requiring greater storage space for all types of digital content, demand for high capacity digital storage space is likely to continue being strong in the foreseeable future,” concluded Tan.

GfK Group