But here we expect a gradual recovery.

I think the group was held back by overly pessimistic Wall Street forecasts until about November of last year. And then the budget information began to leak and it was much more positive than most had been anticipating.

Data growth was one driver, but the availability of affordable systems that support multiple tiers of storage to address data protection, business continuity requirements, and online, active archives also contributed.

The external disk storage systems market growth continued to accelerate through the year.

We've seen kind of blase growth since the bottom fell out in 2001; it's nice to see that throughout 2005 we were accelerating.

This is the third consecutive quarter that disk storage systems revenue growth has outpaced that of the server market. However, internal storage growth has exceeded external growth in three of the last four quarters as organizations explore new technologies that increase the flexibility of storage configurations.