Rising demand for external storage

With digital information growing by leaps and bounds, there's an increasing demand for external hard disk drives (HDDs) in India. The country is one of the top three fastest-growing markets at 15.1 per cent CAGR. The growth pace is comparable to China that is growing at 21.7 per cent CAGR (2005-10, IDC).

Moreover, prices too are falling. The GB unit pricing is down to $8.37 (around Rs 400) per GB. The HDD industry worldwide reached a

major milestone in the fourth quarter of 2005 as suppliers shipped more than 100 million units, an all-time quarterly high for the market, according to iSuppli Corp.

Names like EMC are hopeful that external storage sector is ready top take off. EMC has a committed investment of $500 million by 2010, which (it claims) is the single largest investment in the storage and information management space. For Manoj Chugh, president, EMC (India & SAARC), the goal for 2007 is clearly to enable Indian enterprises and the government build robust information infrastructures and shift the focus of organisations from the 'T' in information technology to information.

"According to industry reports, digital information has been growing by more than 60-70 per cent annually," he says, "so, companies that have large, diverse and complex IT environments are looking to simplify the management of these environments would be the earlier adopters of external storage solutions."

The creation of huge amounts of digital content on the consumer front is the main reason for increasing storage demand. "This includes creating and maintaining personal music files, videos, images, family data and games," says Sharad Shrivastava of Western Digital. External HDDs, he feels, are a 'hot piece of hardware' for SOHOs (Small Office, Home Office) and archiving facilities for larger enterprises.

Flash drives or memory sticks of up to 2-16 GB are no match against the 3.5-inch hard drives (which continue to make up the majority of shipments) with capacities in the range 500GB. Roughly, a 40 GB HDD can hold up to almost 10,000 MP3 files, 40 hours of MPEG video, three hours of video and 40,000 digital photos. No need to worry about wires since most external drives use the Universal Serial Bus (USB) or Fire wire interface to transfer data from the computer to the device. Consumers mostly opt for high-performance 7,200 RPM (revolutions per minute) drives and higher RPM ones.

All this space comes at a price. Western Digital, Maxtor, Seagate, Hitachi have 20-60 GB external HDDs for which you might be required to fork out anywhere between Rs 12,000 - Rs 25,000.