CES 2010: Storage has traditionally got larger and cheaper, but this year could see that change.
After a rough 2009 and a decade of decreasing costs and increasing capacity, prices for hard drives and other forms of mass storage might rise for the first time in recent memory.
"This is going to be an interesting decade ahead," analyst Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates said at the opening of the Storage Visions 2010 conference in Las Vegas, taking place just ahead of the official opening of CES 2010 "There's still demand for storage, even in bad times, and I don't believe that trend is going to stop."
"We're going to see more storage in consumer products than ever before," Coughlin said. "We're still buying storage because it's still useful to us."
Ever-increasing capacities combined with fierce competition have meant that in recent years average costs per megabyte have continued to decline. However, 2010 might see a temporary halt to that trend, at least in the hard drive market, Coughlin predicted.
"In the hard disk drive space, we're going to see capacity constraints," he said. "Manufacturers will not be able to make as much as demand requires, so it will be a good year for revenue." That might not mean a massive rise in the price of an external hard drive at your local PC retailer, but it could mean that some of the massive discounts seen in 2009 won't reappear for a while."
There's been an increasing shift towards flash-based storage in recent years, most evident in the near-universal absence of optical drives from netbook PCs. However, Coughlin said that this shift hadn't yet made a major difference to the hard drive storage market.
"There's more growth than there is replacement," he said. "There's more hard drives being sold because of flash memory. Most consumer flash applications only exist because of hard disks to store the content in the long run. All these things are growing each other. These things don't necessarily replace things in other places; they augment it."