Data storage maker eyes hard disk growth

A senior manager from one of the world’s leading data storage business firms said Tuesday that demand for hard disk drives would continue to rise despite increasing demand for smaller, faster solid-state drives.

In the current digital age when every minute, 30 hours of video are posted on YouTube; 100,000 are Twitter; 6 million posted on Facebook; and 20 million photos are uploaded to Flickr, according to leading data storage firm Western Digital Corp, the importance of storage technology cannot be emphasized enough. And WDC’s hard drives will meet the needs of the market, claimed Patrick Lo, regional marketing senior manager of WDC’s Asia-Pacific sales office.

“The HDD has been and will remain as the major storage system to keep data safely and efficiently until 2020,” said Lo at a launching event for WD Se, the firm’s first enterprise-class hard drive for the scale-out data-center market.

“My answer to the question about whether HDDs will be replaced by SSDs was ‘no,’ three years ago. The answer today is still the same.”

An SSD, found in small devices such as netbooks and smartphones ― versus HDD, mainly found in personal computers ― is a data storage device using integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data. The storage system does not need a mechanical arm as with hard drives to read and write information.

Lo remains confident about the constant growth of the HDD business due to the pace of technological development and cost effectiveness of the two storage systems.

While the HDD currently has a storage capacity of up to 4 terabytes, the SSD has a maximum capacity of 512 gigabytes, according to the firm.

And the hard drive is at least seven times cheaper than the flash-memory based drive.

WDC, however, makes constant efforts to keep up with the latest tech trends by increasing its investment in the SSD market. The storage firm took over sTec, an enterprise SSD firm, last month.

By Kim Young-won  (wone0102@heraldcorp.com)