Disk storage systems factory revenue reached $7.4bn (£4.5bn) during the third quarter of 2013, a 5.6% decline compared to last year, according to a report from International Data Corporation (IDC).

Though the storage system revenues declined during the quarter, total disk storage systems capacity grew 16.1% year-over -year, reaching about 8.4 exabytes.

The external disk storage systems revenue dropped 3.5% to $5.7bn during the third quarter of 2013.

IDC Storage research director Eric Sheppard said:"However, this demand has been offset by several factors: reduced spending from the US government, increased use of storage efficiency technologies, increased investment in public cloud capacity, and general price pressures associated with increased competitive environments."

EMC and NetApp secured the first two positions in the external disk storage systems market with market share of 30.6% and 13% respectively.

IBM occupied the third position with 11.4% of external revenue followed by HP which accounted for 9.5%, while Hitachi stood fifth with an 8.3% revenue share during the quarter.

The total open networked disk storage revenue including NAS Combined with non-mainframe SAN dropped 3.4% during the third quarter to about $5bn, in which EMC and NetApp held 33.7% and 15% revenue shares repectively.

During the quarter, the Open SAN market went down by 6.1% year over year, where EMC lead the market with a 29% revenue share followed by IBM with 14.4% share, while HP, Hitachi, and NetApp accounted for 12.5%, 10.0%, and 9.0% of sales respectively.