According to Gartner global Q4 2013 external controller-based (ECB) disk storage revenues total $6.3 billion-- a 5% Y-o-Y increase and return to growth following an "abysmal" Q3 2013.

"Driven by pent-up demand and the year-end budget flush phenomenon, the market overcame a fragile global economy" the analyst says.

Only EMC and HP beat 5% market growth rate-- HP leads when it comes to growth (25.3% Y-o-Y) thanks to broad acceptance of the 3PAR StoreServ and StorOnce disk-based backup platforms, while market leader EMC sees success through the VNX and Data Domain refreshes.

LaCie announces its fastest portable storage solution yet-- the LaCie Little Big Disk, a Thunderbolt 2-equipped number promising speeds of up to 1375MB/s in a package fitting inside a laptop bag.

It carries a pair of 500GB PCIe SSDs (for a total of 1TB storage), and can be daisy chained with another Little Big Disk to deliver speeds of up to 2600MB/s when connected to a Mac Pro.

Sony and Panasonic team up in long-term digital storage development and announce "Archival Disc," a high-capacity optical disc format promising to initially hold up to 300GB of data.

The discs will be the same size as current Blu-ray discs, and should be readable for at least 50 years with 3 storage layers per side. According to the two companies larger capacity and higher playback quality is archived via crosstalk cancellation and high-order Partial Response Maximum Likelihood (PRML) technologies.

Aiding long-term storage applications further is the discs having no need for constant temperature or humidity, as well as reduced power consumptions compared to magnetic tape formats.

Datto upgrades the SIRIS and ALTO hybrid cloud backup disaster recovery and business continuity solutions, and reveals a first NAS appliance with cloud backup capabilities at the 2014 XChange Solution Provider event.

The SIRIS 2 disaster recovery appliance update offers SSD caching, hot-swap bays for on-site upgrades, rack mount capabilities and upgraded hardware including Intel processors and SSDs to boost disaster recover performance further.

The line features 3 products-- SIRIS 2 Business (aimed at SMB customers, handles up to 2TB of disaster recovery storage), Professional (for medium-sized businesses with instant local failover, redundant cloud backup and up to 5TB storage) and Enterprise (with dual Xeon E5 processors, 96GB RAM and up to 36TB storage).

All models feature front panel USB 3.0 ports for faster RoundTrip process support.