Significant Growth in Small Form Factor and Mobile PC Hard Disk Drives to Boost Worldwide HDD Semiconductor Market

IDC: Significant growth in the small form factor and mobile PC hard disk drive (HDD) segments will more than counterbalance flat growth in the desktop PC and enterprise HDD segments to accelerate worldwide semiconductor revenue growth through 2009. While the worldwide HDD semiconductor market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.6% from 2004 to 2009, chip revenue in the small form factor HDD will experience the healthiest growth rate with a 39.4% CAGR over the same period. Small form factor HDD chip revenue will represent nearly a quarter of the market by 2009.It is critical for HDD semiconductor suppliers to become mindful of end demand as volatile consumer markets grow to drive more and more HDD unit shipments. Consumer markets are also perilous for the growing conflict they represent between HDD storage and NAND flash memory storage.

• System-in-Chip (SoC) will be increasingly adopted across all form factors

• Perpendicular recording technology will take hold over the forecast period

• NAND flash memory's adoption in portable devices will force small form factor drives to move into devices that require higher storage capacity than NAND can support economically

Worldwide Hard Disk Drive Semiconductor 2005-2009 Forecast Publ 20051129 Release publ. in: IQ Online Flash NON/NAND? Wikipedia