1 billion Seagate hard drives and counting...

Reuben Lee | Apr 30, 2008

Storage maker Seagate has certainly come a long way in the hard drive business, from its 5MB ST506 hard drive in 1979 to its latest 1TB Barracuda drive which was introduced last year. Just today, the company also announced that it is the first hard drive manufacturer to ship 1 billion hard drives.

If you cannot visualize 1 billion hard drives, picture this. You can circle the globe 13.7 times with the 1 billion drives placed end-to-end, according to Seagate. Admittedly, the 1 billion drives are not all Seagate-branded. It also includes the ones manufactured by Conner, which merged with Seagate in 1996, as well as those from Maxtor which was acquired in December 2005.

What's noteworthy, however, are some of the other statistics behind the 1 billion drives. For example, the first 5MB drive, the Seagate ST506, weighs a hefty 5lb and cost US$1,500 a pop. A 3.5-inch 1TB drive today, which is 200,000x more in terms of capacity, retails at only a fraction of that cost. More interestingly, it took Seagate 17 years to ship 100 million drives, but it took the company only 12 years to make the other 900 million units.

What's scary is Seagate expects to hit its 2 billionth hard drive milestone within the next five years, based on current increases in production capacity and demand. Honestly, this looks like a very possible scenario, considering the GBs of data we are guzzling daily with no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

At the press event today, Seagate also did a little crystal ball gazing, predicting that higher broadband penetration and rapid growth in digital content will see market demand for hard drive storage increase by almost 80 percent by 2012. The company has, however, played down the impact of Solid State Drives (SSDs) on traditional disk-based hard drives in the coming years, believing instead that hybrid drives will be the high-value proposition for most users. The company will still be involved in the SSD business though, with its first product expected later this year.

Filed under: Notebooks, PC & Peripherals
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ferdiei

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ferdiei says...
if they (or somebody) build the RAID functionality inside a drive or whatever they have termed 'hybrid' here, it may serve as a differentiator in the current fierce storage device market.

Apr 30, 2008 22:02