Not so Far Future
In a highly demanding economy hard disk drives are relatively cheap, which keeps them as a remaining
dominated storage for personal consumers and enterprise businesses. Since there is so much competition
in today’s market, disk drives face the possibility of being replaced. Market leaders of the hard drive
market believe to keep the market thriving, these companies will continue to innovate and increase capacity
to appeal to buyers.
Disk Drives Fighting Back
Western Digital and Toshiba, these two market leaders are further pushing out larger disk drives for
businesses and consumers, Western Digital unveiled earlier this year that it would go towards MAMR disk
drives. Western Digital investment in microwave-assisted magnetic recording or MAMR drives, the company
states, “That they are more reliable and have lower temperatures than heat-assisted magnetic recording
drives or HAMR drives.” Western Digital also plans on distributing a 40 terabyte MAMR drive on or before
2025 to stay ahead in the market. Additionally, Seagate is pushing towards HAMR drives as they expand and
create larger storage disk drives.
An alternate approach to the market is being taken by a Japanese company, HOYA, as they attempt to appeal
towards the hard drive market by shifting disk drives from aluminum to glass. HOYA states,
“That glass offers, more heat resistance and the disk drive will contain more substrates.”
Hoya Corporation, which isn’t a major provider for hard drives in the current market, currently have
$49.93 stock value with a constantly increasing growth in their company. The company is expected to grow
with the introduction of glass disk drives, but by an uncertain amount. These innovations do not show any
promises in the hard drive market, but hard drive companies will continue to innovate and make larger disk
drives with hopes that hard drives will always have a place in the market.
Closing
With disk drives being a dominate storage, they are being constantly exposed to alternate market threats
such as disk, tape, flash, cloud storage, and more. Western Digital and Seagate have been continuously
providing larger disk drives, thus making younger models cheaper each year. With continued innovation
within the hard drive market, disk drives continue to receive faster transfer speeds and larger storage
capacity to rival their storage competitors. With the drop in price of hard drives, hard drives gain more
appeal, until solid state drives decrease in price per gigabyte to a point that is more appealing.
This price competition has been ongoing and in recent years the disk drive market has been declining,
this will decide the hard drive market in the future.