Hard drive use to quadruple by 2011

But the industry needs to watch out for three trends, including a drop in the price of NAND flash which will affect sales in handhelds and will have an effect on traditional sales as solid state drives start to arrive.

Vendors need to be careful about creating overcapacity, as that will eat into their margins. Enterprise storage customers are likely to use smaller size HDDs too.

But said John Rydning, research manager for IDC: "The fundamental need for additional storage capacity worldwide will continue to generate solid HDD demand." µ