HDD Decline in 2011? Probably not.
Natural Disasters Contribute To HDD Decline In 2011 | TechWeekEurope UK.
“A new report from IDC has confirmed the fact that worldwide shipments of hard-disk drive units experienced a year-over-year decline of 4.5 percent in 2011.”
“According to the IDC forecast, the HDD industry will record year-over-year unit shipment growth of 7.7 percent in 2012 and a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.6 percent from 2011 to 2016.”
Gosh, that caused a yawn. The point is HDD sales took a dent in 2011. They seem to be recovering, people still want to buy them, and prices have finally settled. USB3 devices are becoming more commonplace, which is a relief, as transferring hundreds of gigabytes of data on a USB2 connection can be painful. From the systems we have here it still looks as if USB3 struggles when transferring lots of small files (high I/O requests). Throughput on large files is good, but safe to say SATA connections still rule the roost for transfer speeds in the consumer market.