The hard drive industry will build an unprecedented number of hard disk drives (HDD) over the next five years, says IT researcher IDC. The majority of this storage capacity--predicted at more than 300,000 petabytes of storage--is expected to be delivered to enterprise data centers and cloud storage systems. This comes barely a year after a global slump in IT spending due to the global recession.

Highlighting how HDDs remain the best storage medium, John Rydning, IDC research director for Storage Mechanisms: Disk, told eWeek, "The big story here is that there is simply a lot of content growth...and how much of that has to be stored, hard drives are still unbeatable, in terms of delivering the best storage device for the money."

What is amazing is how the industry is expected to ship more capacity for enterprise consumption in the next couple of years than it did in the 20 years before. Other developments mentioned by the report include the declining cost of HDD storage in terms of price per gigabyte, as well as the shift from the venerable 3.5-inch form factor to the more compact 2.5-inch.

For more on this story:
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