The rise of storage peripherals as a mainstream IT product line has been in sync with the consumerization of IT products. While the need for storage of new digital entertainment content has resulted in the rise of optical disk drives, demand for mobility and flexibility has been the major reason behind the increasing demand for flash drives. That has resulted in a sharp drop in the prices of flash drives, which in turn has fuleled further growth. External hard drives, however, do not have the lifestyle appeal of a flash drive. Neither do they match the ODDs in terms of ease of use and convenince, resulting in a decline of their market.

External Hard Drives
This was indeed a slow year for the Indian external hard disk market, as dwindling demands led to a 17% decline in revenues. It needed no rocket scientist to determine the reason behind the fall: increasing capacities of hard disks internal to PCs and laptops meant fewer takers for external HDDs. Though professionals like photographers, designers, music buffs, gaming enthusiasts and composers still preferred external HDDs due to their portability, major players like Seagate, Samsung, and Western Digital focused on increasing capacities of internal disks.

The year also saw the external hard disk industry reaching few long awaited milestones: When the internal hard disk market saw the launch of 1 Tb (terabyte) storage, Seagate built the excitement with a 750 Gb external hard disk launch. The trends more or less revolved around portability, plug and play, high-speed interfaces, ruggedness, and low power consumption. The lower prices were also a major factor driving sales.

Players like Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi ruled the marketin that order. With so much digital content creation on a regular basis, the need for larger capacity storage devices offering mobility is expected to grow further, though at a slower rate. However, the share of external hard disks out of the total requirement will see an upsurge in the coming years.

Flash Drives
At a time when external HDDs, high definition DVDs and new arrival, Blu-ray disks made headlines, the lower storage and mobility market was under the control of USB drives or flash drives. Despite being an unorganized market, the growth was astounding, which was further proving the popularity of this media. The shift from FDD to pen drives continued throughout the year due to the high demand from working professionals, students, and home users.

According to Shiladitya Sarkar, manager, Peripherals Research, IDC India, "TheIDC estimated shipments for flash drives through official channels in India stands at 750,000 units for the second half of 2006. However, this official shipments estimate represents less than 5% of the total estimated shipments forthis family of products in India during 2006."

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