Strong hard-disk commoditization in Asian and Pacific countries will continue to drive down storage prices world-wide, according to latest research.

Total shipments of new external storage in the region continued to grow at exponential rates, according to marketing research firm, IDC. The firm observed an increase of 81.8 percent from the same period last year and a total of 62,289TB of external storage capacity for the second quarter of 2006. The continuing trend of exceptionally high storage capacity growth coupled with strong revenue growth is propelling storage prices to a new low.

The same drivers of the downward trend in GB unit pricing over the past few quarters continue to push the prices down, says Jack Yu, Market Analyst for IDC's Asia/Pacific Storage Research.

These include the widespread use of cheaper Serial ATA (SATA) and Serial Attached Storage (SAS) drives and vendors' emphasis on the growth of the midrange disk systems market.

China continues to be the major contributor to the region in terms of storage demand, accounting for over 32 percent of the market, with Australia following at 18 percent.

HP and IBM led the APEJ external disk storage markets in the second quarter, with 20.3 percent and 19.4 percent of the market respectively.