148 petabytes of external disk storage sold in Asia Pacific in 2005

According to IDC, a strong finish to the year saw Asia-Pacific disk storage customer revenue for the calendar year 2005 increase by 22.4% over 2004, from $1,573 mln to $1,926 mln. Q4 2005 recorded the fastest quarterly growth rate in external disk systems, based on end-user revenue, increasing by 25.4% over Q4 2004. The demand for new external storage capacity increased dramatically in 2005, growing by 93.8% over 2004. IDC noted total shipments of new external storage capacity in the APEJ region for 2005 was 147,955 TBs, up from 76,351 TBs in 2004. In addition to new applications and storage-intensive data types, the availability and greater acceptance of larger capacity ATA disk drives, as well as a steady fall in the dollar price per GB ($/GB) for fibre channel (FC) disks have contributed to the spurt in demand.