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The company, which makes the popular MyBook line of external hard drives, said that the revised forecast was based on rising prices, following years of cut-throat competition that have seen HDD storage prices fall sharply in recent years.

In 2003 a 200GB HDD cost around $750. Two years later the same capacity could be added to a computer for a fifth of that price, around $150. Today 200GB can be bought for less than $75.

The upturn in prices, while it may not please consumers, will relieve the pressure on beleaguered drive and component manufacturers. Bill Watkins, chief executive of another leading HDD supplier, Seagate, said earlier this year that some of his company's competitors "are losing hundreds of millions of dollars" as a result of low-priced drives.

Western Digital this week completed the acquisition of Komag, a manufacturer of the thin-film disks used in high-capacity hard drives.