Over the past several years, hard drive manufacturers have become an increasingly rare breed. Venerable brands like Quantum and Maxtor disappeared, Fujitsu sold out to Toshiba, and more recently Hitachi and Samsung were snapped up — by Western Digital and Seagate, respectively. That means the Royal Rumble for HDD supremacy is now down to its final three combatants as others gravitate toward more modern solid-state counterparts.

There’s no denying that traditional hard drives will eventually go the way of the CD — which, we’ve been repeatedly told, was was killed by iTunes. But let’s not forget that in a day and age where iTunes is raking in billions in digital download sales, the CD still refuses to go away quietly — and that’s going to be the case with hard drives, too.

Despite the allure of SSDs, consumers still have a voracious appetite for storage, and hard drives offer a ridiculously low price per gigabyte. Our Blu-ray rips, lossless audio files, multi-megapixel digital photos, and HD and 3D video recordings take up tons of space, after all, and the remaining OEM trio will happily keep foil bagging and retail boxing massive internal and external drives.

But media-hungry consumers aren’t the only people with a lust for capacious drives. SSDs and flash storage are a smart choice for plenty of devices (like smartphones and tablets) where physical space is at a premium and capacity isn’t quite so important. A side effect of comparatively scant internal storage, though, is that the people developing apps for those devices are falling over themselves to provide cloud connectivity — and as demand for space in the cloud increases, service providers will continue to snap up the newest, biggest drives available in order to house more and more end user data. That, too, will feed Western Digital and Seagate coffers for a long time to come.

So what will become of Toshiba? With only 10% of the market and the bulk of that coming from 2.5″ drives, Toshiba’s hard drive unit makes a juicy target for Seagate, which would then have an equal 50% share of the market with Western Digital. That prospect raises some concerns, of course, since duopolies are rarely a good thing for consumers. With Toshiba’s narrow focus and comparatively small number of units shipped, however, that’s pretty much the situation we’re looking at right now. An acquisition by one of the big dogs would realistically cause more of a ripple than a tidal wave.