Examine The Digital Storage Market In Consumer Electronics 2008, As Storage Capacity Requirements Could Double Those Of The Average User

DUBLIN, Ireland-- (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/1c866d/digital_storage_in) has announced the addition of the "Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics 2008" report to their offering.

This report is the seventh report on data storage and emerging applications and the fifth report on data storage and the consumer electronics market. The 2008 report is accompanied by a separate report giving results from a consumer survey conducted in 2007 regarding uses of consumer devices, content storage trends and storage expectations and requirements. The data storage requirements for consumer devices are increasing.

This demand is fuelled by the availability of inexpensive digital storage devices, increasing interface and Internet bandwidth as well as greater processing power in smaller devices. The combination of developments in these technologies is enabling the availability of greater amounts of content and at higher resolutions. It is also enabling the growth of user generated content at higher and higher resolutions.

The best chance for optical distribution to remain competitive is in higher resolution content since downloading such content is difficult except in higher bandwidth households. We expect that in the next ten years content files of several hundred GB or more could be used by consumers for Ultra-HD video or even higher resolution content. This could help defend optical disc use but nevertheless optical disk sales are expected to decline for consumer applications over the next few years.

The bottom line is, we have only seen the beginning of what consumer electronics will do to demand for digital storage. The projections given here may seem aggressive but the authors believe that they may actually be conservative in many areas. We list some key points of the report in the following list.

Key Points:

By 2015 overall consumer content, including commercial, personal as well as shared content could add up to about 760 exabytes worldwide.
• Projections based up on a consumer survey show that we could expect over 2.2 TB of new content in an average home in 2013 including backups.
• By 2013 total content in an average home could total almost 9 TB. 5 TB of this is commercial content.
• Projections for the upper 10% most active users of content in the home could easily see their storage capacity requirements double those of the average user.
• After 2010 Life Logs and other new content capture and sharing technologies could drive the use of storage capacity for user generated content to enormous levels.
• After 2010 mobile computing and consumer applications will dominate HDD unit shipments and sub-3.5 inch form factor drives will be larger than 3.5-inch drive shipments by 2012.
• Most mobile applications will migrate to flash memory except where higher storage capacities are required for mobile library content or higher resolution video is captured (such as in higher resolution, longer use time camcorders). Projected lifelogs and personal memory assistants will also need larger amounts of storage for content capture and storing content proxies and thus will also favour small form factor hard disk drives.
• Hybrid drives could find applications in consumer electronic products that need the storage capacities of a hard disk drive but want to have power usage and ruggedness approaching that of solid state drives.
• Most static consumer applications favour the growth of hard disk drives since higher resolution is required for larger screens and homes are generally where user generated content as well as commercial content libraries are kept. Backup and protection of data will also drive the use of hard disk drives in the home.
• Economic and performance factors favour greater integration of digital consumer application into the storage devices.
• External storage is taking an increasing importance in consumer applications as a way to protect and share content in the home. We project that by 2013 there will be 150 million hard disk drives used in all small external storage devices. This includes direct attached as well as external storage. Many but not all of these devices will be used in the home.
• Optical storage will be defending itself against new content distribution technologies such as downloading and the main defence it has is the support of higher resolution content that makes downloading too onerous.
• Digital storage in the home will become increasingly networked. There will be a growth in personal network storage devices that allow mobile users high performance access to large amounts of data on the go.
• As greater amounts of data are generated and accumulated in the home and as this content is spread between more and more consumer devices there will arise the need for virtualization and other more sophisticated ways to make management of all this content easier.
• Ultimately we believe that there will arise a highly abstracted "home storage utility" that will hide the complexity of storage in consumer devices, handle data transfers and backup and indexes and automatically generates appropriate metadata for that content.
• Total digital storage device capacity for all storage devices shipped into the home could reach 650 exabytes by 2013. At the same time expected accumulated consumer data by 2013 is expected to be about 760 exabytes.

Key Topics Covered:

• Select Survey Projections
• Storage Device Trends
• Applications for Storage in Consumer Electronics Products
• Remote storage
• Trends for Storage Devices in Consumer Applications
• List of Figures
• List of Tables