The increased adoption of solid-state drives (SSD) among ultrabooks and other ultra-thin PCs, and tablets boosted significantly the overall SSD shipments in the first quarter, according to IHS.

　　Global shipments of SSDs amounted to 11.5 million units in the first quarter of 2013, up 92% from the six million units shipped a year ago, according to IHS. The shipments include standalone SSDs, cache SSDs and hybrid drives.

　　Shipments of SSDs for ultrabooks and other ultra-thin PCs reached 5.9 million units in the first quarter of 2013, up more than threefold from 1.9 million units during the same three-month period in 2012, IHS indicated.

　　SSDs also made a sizable splash in the tablet sector during the same period, IHS noted. Shipments of SSDs for tablets hit 1.6 million units in the first quarter of 2013, surging from just 542,000 units a year earlier.

　　"The SSD market enjoyed big results in the first quarter as both the consumer and enterprise markets ramped up their use of machines that made use of the drives," said Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS. "Most notably, SSD attach rates climbed in ultrathin/Ultrabook PCs where SSDs are the de facto storage medium, and also in PC tablets where productivity options differentiate them from media tablets."

　　Meanwhile, shipments of hard disk drives (HDD) amounted to 135.7 million units in the first quarter of 2013, down 7% from 145.5 million the same time a year ago, IHS said.

　　HDD enterprise demand is expected to continue growing because of the exploding use of data among consumers, especially in music, video and social networking, IHS observed. Shipments to the sector totaled 16 million units in the first quarter of 2013, up from 14.9 million a year ago.

　　However, the HDD market is encountering challenges in the consumer PC segment, IHS noted. The HDD consumer PC space had worse results than either the HDD enterprise segment or the entire SSD consumer PC market, mainly because of poor sales of desktops and notebooks on which the HDD market relies, IHS said. Total HDD consumer PC shipments fell to 93.3 million units in the first quarter, down from 105.3 million in first-quarter 2012.