82.7% more terabytes of external storage sold in Asia-Pacific in Q3 2005

According to IDC, the demand for external disk storage capacity continued to surge in Q3 2005 in Asia-Pacific excluding Japan. New storage capacity was 82.7% higher than for the corresponding period in 2004. This maintained the strong growth rates recorded in the two previous quarters. The demand for external storage capacity increased dramatically in 2005. In addition to new applications and storage-intensive data types, it has been assisted by the availability and greater acceptance of larger capacity ATA disk drives, as well as a steady fall in the dollar price per GB for fibre channel (FC) disks. External disk storage systems connected to servers via a Storage Area Network accounted for 69.8% of disk storage systems revenue in Q3 2005. In contrast, Network Attached Storage (NAS) and direct attached storage accounted for much smaller portions of revenue, at 10.6% and 19.6% respectively.