According to an iHS iSuppli report, the growing all-in-one PC market is set to push up demand for 2.5" HDD sales from next to nothing this year to 1 million units in 2013. 2.5" HDDs have the advantage of a smaller form factor, better power efficiency and a capacity of up to 1TB. Until recently, they have almost exclusively been used in portable computers, servers and compact external hard disks.
The all-in-one PC market is expected to increase demand on 2.5" HDDs to 3 million units in 2015, followed by 7 million units in 2016. However, 3.5" hard disks will continue to dominate the HDD market, but with a slower growth than 2.5" HDDs over the same period. 3.5" HDD Demand is estimated to be 31 million units in 2016 for the all-in-one PC market.
An all-in-one usually consists of a touch screen monitor and the PC hardware built as a single unit, that looks like a thicker than usual LCD monitor. Examples include the TouchSmart from HP, the Samsung Series 7 and the Asus EEE Top Touchscreens. An estimated 4% of all-in-one PCs are expected to use 2.5" HDDs in 2014 and expected to reach 18% of the all-in-one PC market by 2016.
Interestingly, there was no mention on SSDs, let alone plans of using hybrid hard disks in all-in-one PCs. For example, some newer laptops come with an mSATA slot which can hold an SSD, allowing an SSD to be used for the OS and a large HDD for data storage, in a similar way to a full PC. This could potentially be done for all-in-one PCs also if they include an mSATA slot, such as in higher spec models.
