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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Register reports that the market for both external hard drives and entry-level networked attached storage (devices with 3-12 bays) is shrinking [theregister.co.uk]:

The very small network attached storage (NAS) market is scarcely alive, according to IDC's 2015 Worldwide Personal and Entry-Level Storage Tracker.

The analyst firm defines personal storage has having one or two disks and entry-level storage as packing three to twelve disk bays. The former category now accounts for 99 per cent of all sales in the combined segments, IDC says. That means that of the 68,466,000 devices the firm says shipped in 2015, just 700,000 or so were small NAS devices. The rest were either single USB-connected disks or two-bay NAS.

The whole segment's sliding, as 2015's shipments were down from 2014's 75,377,000 units shoved out the door. The culprit? Cloud, which users increasingly see as a fine alternative to desktop storage. And why wouldn't they, given that the likes of Microsoft fling a terabyte of capacity at users when they sign up for Office 365? Lock-in, you say. Fair point. But we digress.

Those still buying in these segments now prefer disks with three to five terabytes capacity, preferably with USB connections. IDC sees USB-C as likely to attract buyers' attention, albeit at the expense of Thunderbolt.

From IDC's press release [businesswire.com]:

"2015 marks the first year of decline in the personal and entry-level storage (PELS) market since the Thailand floods in 2011," said Jingwen Li, Senior Research Analyst, Storage Systems. "The growing utilization of cloud storage continues to negatively affect the demand for PELS. In response, players in the PELS market are being forced to either capture more market opportunities through M&A or go through re-organization to better position their PELS business."

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