You’ve probably heard or read about marketers and vendors who have predicted the demise of hard disk drives (HDDs). Here’s something that digs into the story and reveals exactly why that’s not going to happen. The Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD site recently published an article about how tablets – which use flash memory for storage – 
don’t hurt, but actually help strengthen the market for hard drives. The argument was presented by Seagate’s own Mark Wojtasiak and is backed up by data from Gartner and IDC.
It’s really all about looking at the big picture opportunity for storage. So when you are consuming information from a tablet, or a device like a smartphone, the net effect is there’s storage on the backend that is continuously serving and delivering all of that content. So as that grows, and the content becomes richer, the storage needs must grow with them too.
Of course at Seagate we like to see more demand for all kinds of storage, as we make HDDs for a range of products from laptops to enterprise, as well as solid state drives (SSDs), and of course our unique solid state hybrid drives (SSHDs). In the article, it states that people will consume about 1,200 exabytes of information and by 2020, it’ll explode to 35,000 exabytes – that’s 30x growth in just 10 years! The numbers are so massive, it can be difficult to put our heads around them and try to describe just how large these figures are –a previous blog we posted here gives some ideas of the scale.
However we look at it, the future appears bright for storage of all types, including hard drives. Check out AllThingsD and let us know your thoughts.
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I highly doubt 1,200EiB are going to be consumed. the industry can not cope with that.