One category of home networking market sure to grow during the next 5 years will be home network storage. ABI Research estimates the market under $400 million worldwide today but growing to just over $1.4 billion worldwide by 2013.
While home net storage will grow 26% annually in the next five years, there are still significant hurdles. Lower cost USB hard drives as well as the increasing number of options for “cloud” based storage will compete with network storage.
“More and more consumers will see a need for both backup and central storage of digital files,” notes research director Michael Wolf. “… there is no beating the speed of local network storage. We think ultimately consumers will choose a mix of both online and locally based network storage.”