FRAMINGHAM, USA: The world's prodigious appetite for digital storage capacity continues to fuel hard disk drive (HDD) demand and revenue. Worldwide HDD shipments are likely to grow in 2008, even in the face of economic uncertainty in the United States, and increase at a CAGR of more than 9 percent between 2007 and 2012, IDC forecasts.

Flash-based solid state disk drives (SSDs) will curtail HDD demand in some markets, but the HDD industry will shrug-off these and other competing storage technologies to attain consecutive years of record-setting HDD shipments and revenue.

"Disk drive OEMs are very aware of the different competing storage technologies that exist today, and will exist in the future," said John Rydning, research director for Hard Disk Drives at IDC. "They will rightly shrug-off these competing technologies for a later day, choosing instead to capitalize on the healthy and profitable opportunities that lie ahead in the hard disk drive industry."

Key trends of the HDD industry include:

* HDD markets least threatened by competing storage technologies such as enterprise storage systems, personal storage devices, and personal video recorders, will compose nearly 50 percent of total HDD unit shipments by 2012.

* Successive generations of HDD products using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology will enable average HDD capacities to increase by nearly three-fold by 2012.