Oracle suffered the most as growth in the storage market continued to slow during the end of 2012. Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM also struggled while EMC emerged as the big winner.

Hitachi today announced the industrys highest-capacity 10,000rpm enterprise-class hard drive, the Ultrastar C10K1200.

Western Digital is expected to release versions of an enterprise-class 3.5-in. helium-filled drive this year, which could propel the company into first place for enterprise drive sales.

Growth in the storage market slowed down during the third quarter, but vendors such as Hitachi, EMC and Fujitsu still had a good three months thanks in part to sales of high-end systems.

Tandberg Data, Imation and Fujifilm have announced separately that they are shipping the new LTO-6 tape drive technology offering up to 1.4TB per hour throughput.

HDS's new flash module is built specifically for enterprise-class workloads. The 1.6TB module fits in an 8U flash chassis. Each enclosure can scale from 6.4TB up to 76.8TB.

Three executives at Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS) have agreed to plead guilty and serve prison time in the U.S. for their participation in a series of conspiracies to rig bids and fix the prices of optical disk drives sold to large computer makers, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) today introduced its fastest laptop hard drive, a 10,000 rpm, 900GB model said to offer up to 18% faster sequential I/O than its predecessors.

In March, Western Digital agreed to buy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies> (HGST), the disk drive subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., in a stock and cash transaction valued at $US4.3 billion. HGST CEO Steve Milligan will join WD as president at the closing of the deal, expected in the fourth quarter.