Research house IDC reckons the worldwide storage market reached $4.8bn last year - a six per cent growth on last year.

The market for external disk storage systems was up $272m in the fourth quarter of 2006 to $4.8bn. In just the fourth quarter the total disk storage market grew by 4.9 per cent to $6.9bn from the same period last year. The total storage capacity shipped last year was 1, 030 petabytes, an increase of 48.5 per cent.

EMC was top vendor in the quarter with 22.1 per cent of revenue. IBM and HP followed with shares of 18.6 per cent and 13.7 per cent of revenues. Dell and Hitachi brought up the rear with 8.1 per cent and 7.3 per cent each.

HP and Dell both saw market share fall - HP lost 3.2 per cent compared to the fourth quarter of 2005 while Dell fell an impressive 8.8 per cent. IDC figures available here.®