FRAMINGHAM, MA -- After years of healthy growth in the disk storage systems hardware market, IDC believes the market declined an astounding $5.7b (18.2%) in 2001. This is the first decline in this market since 1998. "Several converging forces fueled this decline, including the demise of many dot-coms, intense price-competition in the U.S., and recession related spending cutbacks. Further contributing to the revenue decrease in this market are the efficiencies recently gained from storage and server consolidation," said Charlotte Rancourt, Research Director Storage Systems. IDC believes that the current US economic downturn will impact other regions of the world during 2002. While the US storage system market is expected to recover in the latter half of 2002, IDC believes the worldwide market will decline 1.7% in 2002 as the US downturn ripples throughout the world. IDC expects the worldwide disk storage system market to grow 5.2% in 2003. Despite overall market declines, pockets of growth can be found within some segments of the disk storage system market. Networked storage systems sales, for example, (comprised of Network Attached Storage and Storage Area Networks) are expected to grow 8.3% in 2001, reaching almost $8.5 billion in market revenue. This growth is fueled by the benefits of storage consolidation and the need for efficient management of storage infrastructure resources. IDC's recently published report, 2001 Disk Storage Systems Forecast and Analysis, 2000-2005 (IDC #26168), defines the worldwide end-user consumption market for RAID storage systems, non-RAID disk systems (JBOD - just a bunch of disks), disk arrays, storage area networks, and network attached storage. Forecasts are provided through 2005. This report covers supplier (factory) and end-user (market) revenue, terabytes, and average-cost-per-gigabyte for each operating system. For further information visit www.idc.com