While storage capacity demand continues to grow at over 50%, year over year, the storage capacity growth in hard disk drives has been slowing down from what it was in prior years.

FORBES: Changing Digital Storage Requirements for Clouds and Mobile Devices

Hard disk drives provide high capacity cost effective digital storage and thus we think that the decline in HDD shipments in 2012 will likely not continue.

FORBES: Why We Should Expect HDD Growth Later this Year

For a number of reasons the total storage capacity for a 5, 400 RPM disk can be higher than a 7, 200 RPM disk.

FORBES: Seagate Discontinuing 7,200 RPM Drives--A Focus on Capacity?

Thus a 5, 400 RPM HDD can use the flash memory for speeding performance while providing as much as 30% higher storage capacity for a given number of active disk surfaces than a 7, 200 RPM drive.

FORBES: Seagate Discontinuing 7,200 RPM Drives--A Focus on Capacity?

The 5.27 megabits of data are more than 600 times bigger than the largest data set previously encoded in DNA. It is the equivalent of the storage capacity of a 3.5-inch floppy computer disk.

WSJ: Harvard Researchers Turn Book Into DNA Code

The traditional enterprise and client compute markets will continue to demand high capacity storage solutions and will be best served by hard disk drives, where manufacturers compete on the ability to deliver cost effective, reliable and energy efficient mass storage devices.

FORBES: Seagate's Growth Rides These Storage Business Trends

Much of these increases in storage capacity will involve the introduction of technologies pioneered in the development of magnetic disk drives.

FORBES: Magnetic Tape Turns 60

In the case quoted above, the CIO believed that his IT department had been on a storage buying binge and it was high time to in fact use more of the raw disk capacity on the machine room floor that was already powered-up and spinning.

FORBES: No new storage in 2013