Shipments of storage products fell by five percent last year, said market research company IHS.
However, solid state drive shipments in 2013 doubled and the reason for the decline in the whole sector is because of contractions in the hard drive and optical disk drive sectors.
Shipments of storage including SSDs, conventional hard drives and optical drives totalled 755 million units. HDDs fell by seven percent to 444.4 million units, optical drives fell by 12 percent to 253 million units while SSDs rose by 82 percent to 57 million units, said IHS. The figures do not include non PC related drives.
The convential HDD sector suffered from the increase in the popularity of smartphones and tablets. However, the enterprise PC sector is more promising than the consumer end of the show.
SSDs are likely to rise by 50 percent during 2014, reaching 189 million units in 2017, which will be half the size of the HDD market which is expected to total 397 million in that year.
