External Hard Drive Shipments Grow 20 Percent in 2009

Segment offers a bit of light in a dim environment.

The year 2009 hasn’t offered much in the way of positive news for the storage market. So would it surprise you that the unit shipments of external Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) are projected to grow 20 percent this year compared to 2008?

This is in direct contrast to PC shipments, which will decline 3.5 percent in 2009, iSuppli Corp. forecasts. Even more interesting is that iSuppli anticipates the external storage space segment to continue to grow steadily despite the fact that it’s already showing signs of saturation.

A Natural Fit
One of the reasons that external HDD sales have exploded in 2009 is the success of the netbook market. External hard drives are a natural fit for netbooks because these small, portable computers have limited storage capabilities.

iSuppli forecasts 35 million netbooks will be sold cumulatively through the end of 2009, and then will generate vigorous annual growth of 39.6 percent in 2010. As a result, this could be a tremendous boon for the external HDD market.

More Space
The first-generation netbooks only came with a 40GByte HDD—allowing them to run an Operating System (OS) and some simple applications. Now, 80GByte HDDs are commonplace, with even 160GByte versions appearing in the market. But this still isn’t enough for consumers’ space-hungry photo, audio and video files.

With the sweet spot for external drives already in the 1TByte range, an external drive for a netbook user makes perfect sense.

Data Safe
Another reason for moving to an external HDD is that it provides an inexpensive way to secure data safely. With the possibility of power outages and computer crashes, or even a failure of internal HDDs inside a PC, consumers are turning to external drives in order to ensure their content and personal records are safe.

External drives also are becoming popular for consumers to store entire catalogs or collections of music and videos and to easily share them with others by connecting the external drive.

iSuppli believes that external HDDs have a promising future as the netbook market grows and people’s need for data security increases.