Spending on raw storage (which in this case includes OEM shipments) declined by 24% to $172 billion in 2019 following two years of strong growth (37% in 2017 and 18% in 2018); nevertheless shipped capacity continued to increase, reaching 1.683 Zetabytes. While the creation of new products with much larger capacity is not the preserve of only chip-based NAND and DRAM products, we are beginning to see solid state devices overtake spinning disks in most IT devices.
I predict that there will be strong capacity growth in 2020 with the total exceeding 2 Zetabytes for the first time. We live in a world in which increasing amounts of trade and social interaction are done digitally, requiring a mass of storage to record them. Raw storage is a difficult product area to master and consequentially there are few suppliers and the market moves in a jagged way as smaller die sizes drive capacity growth, which I refer to as ‘stochastic’. I don’t expect this to change in 2020.
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