External storage market up 17.9% in Q4 2005

Worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues grew $708 mln in Q4 2005, posting 17.9% growth from Q4 2004 to $4.7 bln, according to IDC. In Q4 2005 the total disk storage systems market grew to $6.8 bln up 13.1% from Q4 2004. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reached 653 petabytes, growing 54.6%. EMC maintained its lead in the external disk storage systems market with 20.6% revenue share, followed by HP and IBM with 18.0% and 15.9% revenue share, respectively. Dell and Hitachi rounded out the top 5 with 9.2% and 7.3%, respectively. Among the top 5 suppliers, Dell and IBM posted the strongest YTY revenue growth during Q4 2005, with 54.2% and 46.8% growth, respectively.

Global external storage market in Q4 2005
	Q4 2005		Q4 2004		Growth
Vendor	Revenue, mln. $	Share	Revenue, mln. $	Share	YTY
EMC	$962	20.6%	$863	21.8%	11.6%
HP	$838	18.0%	$745	18.8%	12.4%
IBM	$743	15.9%	$506	12.8%	46.8%
Dell	$428	9.2%	$278	7.0%	54.2%
Hitachi	$340	7.3%	$322	8.1%	5.6%
Others	$1,352	29.0%	$1,242	31.4%	8.9%
Total	$4,664	100.0%	$3,955	100.0%	17.9%
Source: IDC