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

IDC has issued a new report that finds "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." IDC predicts that "small form factor HDD chip revenue will represent nearly a quarter of the market by 2009."

Shane Rau at IDC said, "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."

IDC forecast the following trends:

• 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