Digital Content in Homes to Drive Demand for Storage Devices

Singapore and Hong Kong — According to IDC’s recent report entitled “Asia/Pacific (Excluding Japan) Home Storage Survey, 2007” (Doc#AP654108P), the proliferation of digital content is creating more opportunities for personal storage devices in various countries in the Asia/Pacific region. Respondents to a recent user survey indicated that they preferred to backup their digital content onto a CD or by copying data to an external HDD attached to the computer. Using a DVD burner to backup data turned out to be the third most popular choice, while a much smaller percentage of respondents used an online storage service or copy data to an external HDD attached to the home network.

Claudio Checchia, research manager of IDC’s Asia/Pacific Consumer Markets comments, “In addition to a growing number of Internet users with a residential broadband connection, penetration of consumer electronics (CE) devices, such as portable MP3 players, gaming consoles, digital cameras, and camcorders continues to grow rapidly. On one hand, the explosion in the amount of digital content consumers handle is expected to generate solid demand for recordable optical drives and hard disk drives (HDDs) used in PCs and other personal storage devices. On the other hand, it also raises new issues concerning the storage, backing up, and sharing of large digital multimedia files.”

IDC’s Skypad Project* 2007 sets out to understand how much digital content — defined as both personal and downloaded from the Internet — respondents have stored in the home PCs. Survey results show that over 50% of the respondents stored less than 100 gigabytes (GB) of digital content, with the highest incidence encountered among respondents in the PRC, followed by India, Korea, Malaysia, and Hong Kong.

Just less than one-quarter of all respondents stored over 100GB of digital content, with Taiwan showing the highest percentage of respondents storing over 100GB, followed by Thailand, Hong Kong, and India. At the high end of the spectrum, respondents who saved over 1 terabytes (TB) of digital content amounted to less than 2%, with higher penetration rates observed in Thailand, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

Looking at the most valuable types of digital content respondents tended to backup, survey data shows that there were some differences for each backup method. However, in general it emerges that personal photos and personal documents were by far the most valuable digital files that majority of respondents tended to backup, followed by audio files and other types of digital images.

IDC expects that the personal storage market will continue to hold more opportunity as survey data shows the majority of respondents believed their digital library would enjoy moderate to aggressive expansion above the current level within the next twelve months. In particular, a higher percentage of respondents in Thailand, India, the PRC, Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan believed that their multimedia content would enjoy moderate to strong growth above the current level within the next year.

This report breaks down responses by country within the Asia/Pacific region, and includes detailed splits on device preferences (for instance, external HDD vs optical drives), differences between networked vs non-networked homes, and correlations with income levels.

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