The third quarter of 2014 saw personal and entry level storage shipments up by 4.8 percent compared to 2013, with 19 million units shipping.
That’s according to IDC analyst Jingwen Li. “The personal and entry level portion of the market saw good growth in higher capacity portable devices as well as personal cloud devices.”
Cloud storage is typically used for an entire household with entry level systems have higher capacity and at a price which people can afford.
While the market continues to be dominated by mainstream non hard drive vendors, with 50.5 percent market share, dedicated HDD vendors like Western Digital are nibbling at this dominance.
IDC predicts further growth in unit shipments in this, the fourth quarter, up by 15.1 percent year on year.
Single bay storage continues to be the most popular choice with 97.5 percent of the market, but dual bay and multiple bay systems are becoming more popular.
USB is still the most popular interface with Ethernet and Thunderbolt taking minor shares in the market.
