Thin mobile computers drive up demand of thin HDDs, says HIS
The combined shipments of 5.0- and 7.0-millimeter HDDs used in mobile PCs will reach 133 million units by 2017, up from just 5 million last year, according to a Storage Space Brief from information and analytics provider IHS.
Lighter in weight and thinner in breadth, the 5.0- and 7.0-mm models will form a new class of ultraslim HDDs that are forecast to eventually displace the much thicker 9.5-mm drives that currently rule the industry. Shipments of the thicker 9.5-mm HDDs for mobile PCs will deteriorate to 79 million in 2017, down from 245 million units in 2012.
Both the 5.0- and 7.0-mm HDD products will see increasing adoption starting this year, along with another form of storage device known as the hybrid HDD, in which a NAND flash component or so-called cache solid-state drive (SSD) is joined with the hard drive within a single storage enclosure.
This year, for instance, the total SSD shipments will climb nearly 90 percent to 64.6 million units, while HDD shipments will decline 5 percent to 545.8 million units. However, the new and thinner HDDs eventually could stem losses of the hard disk space, especially if their costs can fall to 10-15 percent of a tablet or to 10-20 percent of an ultrathin PC, IHS believes.
These cost thresholds are important because they could be instrumental in persuading tablet and ultrathin PC brands to consider 5.0- and 7.0-mm. hard disks as possible alternatives to the SSDs now used as the predominant storage element. Solid-state drives are relatively expensive at present compared to other storage types and cut into the overall margins of computer and tablet makers, so the use of more economical storage alternatives that boost the bottom line of makers would make a persuasive argument to undertake a switch.
HDD manufacturers jump into the fray
All three manufacturers of hard disk drives—U.S.-based Western Digital Corp. and Seagate Technology, as well as Toshiba of Japan—will have their own product offerings for the new and thinner HDDs.
Western Digital fired the opening salvo in April, announcing it had started shipping the 5.0-mm WD Blue ultraslim HDD and the Black SSHD—a solid-state hybrid drive with a hard drive component alongside the cache SSD—to select industry distributors as well as original equipment manufacturer customers.
Western Digital claims that the 500-gigabyte capacities of the two models will reduce weight by as much as 30 percent compared to a 9.5-mm HDD, with a circuit board using cellphone miniaturization technology able to maximize the mechanical sway space in the hard drive to ensure shock resistance.
Western Digital then announced in June shipments of the world’s currently thinnest 1-terabyte drive—the 7.0-mm. WD Blue—with both Acer and Asus likely to use the product in their upcoming ultrathin PCs.
For its part, Western Digital archrival Seagate announced also in June it had shipped 5.0-mm HDDs to Asus, Dell and Lenovo for their ultrathin PCs for the second half of 2013. Seagate says its 500-gigabyte hard drive occupies 25 percent less space than the company’s 7.0-mm HDD.
Reacting to the developments from Western Digital and Seagate, Toshiba said it would ship a 7.0-mm solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD) in 320- and 500-gigabyte configurations, likewise by the end of June. Previously, Toshiba only had a 9.5-mm SSHD of up to 750 gigabytes.
Visit IHS at www.ihs.com
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