Consumer electronics propels hard disk drives demand

BINTAN ISLAND, Indonesia -- The consumer electronics industry will drive the demand for hard disk drives in the next few years, storage vendor Hitachi Global Storage Technology said.
“Twenty percent of hard disk drive business is now coming from consumer electronics. By 2010, each household will be using 10 to 20 hard disk drives and they won’t even know it,” said Jaya Dharan, general manager for Asia Pacific South of Hitachi Global Storage Technology during the IT Journo Forum held here.

Hard disk drives are now starting to find their way in consumer electronic products such as MP3 players, digital cameras, portable gaming devices, personal digital assistants, DVD players and mobile phones, Dharan said.

Consumer electronic vendor JVC has recently unveiled a digital camera that comes with a removable 4-gigabyte hard disk drive from Hitachi, according to the executive.

He also noted that another vendor has recently incorporated a hard disk drive into a mobile phone, although he declined to name

the vendor. Last month, Samsung unveiled in Japan the first mobile phone that incorporates a 1.5-gigabyte hard disk storage.

“The bottomline here is that the outlook for hard disk drives for consumer electronics is very encouraging as smaller form factors are released to the market,” the executive said.

Earlier reports indicated that Apple Computer is using Hitachi’s small hard drive to power its latest iPod Mini music player. Hitachi has provided the computer vendor the 4Gb micro drive, which measures 1-inch across.