Dubai: Sales of hard disk drives (HDDs) have been on the decline due to weakening personal computers and tough competition from solid-state drives but Western Digital (WD) sees growing demand from data centres and surveillance market.
“What has happened is that there is a shift in the market. About five years ago, people used to put HDDs into PCs but that demand is slowing down. It has offset by the demand for hard drives in surveillance, NAS (network-attached storage), and enterprise,” Scott Davis, senior vice-president of global sales at Western Digital, told Gulf News.
He said the storage demand is still very strong with consumer moving towards mobile but the types of storing contents have changed.
Western Digital acquired flash manufacturer SanDisk in May this year for $19 billion to add solid date drives to its portfolio.
The new SSDs complement WD’s range of hard drives for PCs and workstations, providing a full portfolio of WD storage devices for virtually any application.
Davis said that SSD demand is growing dramatically but the biggest challenge with SSD is the supply.
“Consumers are moving to higher storage capacities. Surveillance is a huge market for HDDs and the UAE is going to be a key player due to Smart City initiative,” he said.
He said the entire customer landscape is changing and there are many other verticals that are growing.
“We continue to lead in capacity for HDDs in data centres and surveillance. The surveillance market for us is growing 50 per cent year over year in the Middle East and Africa region but worldwide, the market is growing between 15-18 per cent,” he said.
He said that the core mandate for CCTV surveillance is to enable faster, real time retrieval and analysis of data to enable everything from better community safety as well as effectively manage traffic management, accident and emergency response in addition to urban development and planning.
According to 6Wresearch, increasing demand for security cameras will push the surveillance market in the UAE to $197.8 million by 2021.
This year, it was also announced that surveillance cameras would be mandatory on all taxis in the emirate. Earlier this year, Dubai Municipality completed the installation of over 2,000 surveillance cameras in busy commercial hubs to safeguard traders.
Western Digital’s maximum capacity for HDD is 10TB and SanDisk launched a 1TB SDXC prototype card for cameras in Germany.
The usage of memory cards are growing day by day due to the increasing demand for memory-heavy formats, including 4K, 360-degree and virtual reality videos.
“The GCC is growing very fast but the turmoil in Turkey is impacting us. We have doubled our business in the region for surveillance in the last one year,” he said.
In 1980s, there were 85 HDD manufacturing companies and now it is down to three — Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba.
According to research company Statista, HDD sales are expected to fall this year to 400 million compared to 468.73 million last year. In 2017, it is expected to fall further to 376 million and 357 million in 2018.
But TrendFocus, storage market tracking company, shipments of SSDs in the first quarter of 2016 were up year on year 32.7 per cent to 30.78 million. Out of this, approximately 27 million drives were designed for client PCs and 4 million were aimed at servers.
In the PC space, sales of SSDs grew about 29 per cent over the first quarter of last year while in the enterprise space shipments of SSDs skyrocketed by 69 per cent compared to the same period in 2015.
As the region continues to boast ambitious investments in digitisation and enhanced connectivity for enterprises and individuals, Davis said that customers need choice to ensure they choose the best storage solution to meet their unique needs and requirements.
“We are witnessing a growing interest in SSDs driven by affordable SSD solutions, advancements in the technology, and an evolving ecosystem,” he said.
According to industry reports, Western Digital had a market share of about 43 per cent of the HDD market in the first quarter of this year while Seagate had 39.38 per cent market share and Toshiba around 17 per cent.
