History (1989): About 18 Million HDDs to Be Sold in 1989 – Dataquest

Dataquest’s latest market survey shows that 17.73 million HDDs will be sold throughout the world in 1989, after a rough year on account of general overproduction that lowered the prices.

3.5-inch disks account for about 60%, then 5.25-inch ones, 8- and 14-inch formats tending to disappear.

From 1989 to 1993, Dataquest expects the market to double and reach 35 million units. In value, it ought to expand from $36.7 million to $57 billion.

Dataquest’s analysts don’t believe the 2.5-inch format will develop, except for the rather limited high-range laptop computer market.

Of course, Winchester disk drives count for the major part of the storage unit sales (over 76% in 1988), a market that includes HDDs, FDDs, magnetic tape drives, optical and electronic disk drives and is evaluated at $48 billion in 1989.

Average annual growing in this segment should reach $78 billion in four years.

Demand in magnetic tape drives should not grow, except for quarter-inch units that should increase from 1.6 million in 1989 to 2.7 million in 1993. In value, half-inch tapes will represent the largest percentage, almost 70% of a global magnetic tape drive market, from $5.1 billion, it should hardly reach $5.8 billion in 1993. Helical scan technology, at its beginning, should have an annual growth of 24% to approach $1 billion in four years.

The FDD market, at $4.9 billion this year, should top at 5.2 billion in 1991 then drop to $4.8 billion in 1993, but its amount should go from 32.4 million to 40 million units, in this same interval.

Of course 3.5-inch FDDs will be ahead of 5.25-inch ones that are at 15 million this year and less than 5 million in 1993.

Concerning optical disks, Dataquest puts together WORM, CD-ROM and erasable disks. This entire market is evaluated a $1.14 billion in 1989 and should improve in the next 5 years to reach $9.8 billion, with only $0.5 billion for CD-ROMs, the leftover split between write-once and erasable disks.

WW park will expand from 252,000 to 4.2 million in 5 years with CD-ROMs still ahead with almost 2 million units.

A recent Frost and Sullivan survey entitled CAD/CAM Market in the U.S., reports that external storage accounted for $402 million or 6.6% of the total revenue of the CAD/CAM market evaluated at $6,121 million.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠17, published on June 1989.