Growth in sales of external controller-based (ECB) storage could have boosted shipments of semiconductors for use in the devices over the past quarter.
In the second three-month reporting period of 2010, industry analyst Gartner saw a 21.4 per cent increase in the value of the ECB disk storage market.
The figures do not include investments in storage area network infrastructure components, but do assess hardware revenue associated with direct purchases, managed services and financial leases.
Roger Cox, research vice-president at Gartner, says: "Led by network-attached storage's 37.6 per cent year-over-year revenue growth, modular ECB disk storage systems increased total market share to 73 per cent."
This compares with the 27 per cent stake in the segment now taken by monolithic ECB disk storage.
Enterprise investment into disk storage could be expected to drive demand for silicon semiconductors due to their use in RAID arrays, a common feature of business storage networks.