What Happens to WW HDD/SSD Market? (Part Two)

Yesterday, we published this article, What Happens to WW HDD/SSD Market? (Part One) but the interesting comment of John Rydning, research VP, Global DataSphere, IDC Corp., arrived too late to be inserted.

Here it is:

My role within IDC is to analyze the Global DataSphere which measures the volume of data generated each year, and to analyze the Global StorageSphere which measures the installed base of storage capacity, and the volume of data stored at the end of each year.
 
The recent weakness in the HDD, NAND, and SSD markets is surprising, and will impact negatively the installed base of storage capacity for this year and even the next few years, unless demand picks up soon. 
 
Our analysis indicates PC and mobile phone users no longer need capacious storage capacity when buying a new PC or mobile phone as they can put their data in the cloud (or social media) or network storage. We have seen the average capacity per PC plateau at a maximum of 1TB of storage. Mobile phone capacities are increasing, but mainly because it is still considered a feature for higher end phones.
 
When looking at long-term trends for the installed base of storage capacity in enterprise datacenters, especially cloud datacenters, it appears that customers were increasing the installed base of storage capacity faster than the long term trend over the past 3-4 years. This may be due to investments into AI infrastructure over this period of time, especially for AI training – but it is difficult to know for certain.
 
IDC frequently surveys companies and consumers about data retention practices.  Organizations have not changed data retention policies to reduce the need for storage capacity. Some survey respondents would like to retain data longer than they do currently, but also indicate there is increased risk with retaining data longer in case they are asked to provide data as part of discovery in a legal matter, or due to security breaches. Consumers indicate they are likely to delete data off phones to make more capacity available. In contrast, consumers generally indicate they do not run out of room to store more data on PCs, and do not delete data often.