A hard drive is no longer the small mundane box that sits inside your PC only. Today, you'll find hard drives in various form factors, and addressing a wide variety of applications. There are HD Ds for portable storage, IP surveillance, small personal NAS boxes, and much more. It's a booming market with only a handful of tex manufacturers to cater to it. Of these, Seagate tops the charts with the highest future readiness index, making it the Users' Choice for this year. It doesn't however enjoy a huge lead over runner up Hitachi, which has a future readiness index of 86. Western Digital is a distant third at 34%. Samsung still managed to stay in the club, though you hardly find its hard drives in the market.

Hitachi was the most persuasive brand with more users likely to buy it than the number of users who recalled it on top of their minds. Western Digital was next most persuasive, behind by 26% on a relative scale. In brand pull Western Digital is ahead of the pack, followed by Hitachi. As Seagate has the highest user share, we found more users switching out of the brand than switching in. It does however, enjoy higher brand loyalty, at 48%. Western Digital had the lowest brand loyalty at 33%, and a whopping 39% of its current saying that they're likely to switch to competing brands. Hitachi had 36% brand loyalty and 30% users likely to shift to competing brands.