Seagate Ships 1 Billion Hard Drives April 24, 2008

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Hard drive manufacturer Seagate is celebrating this week by becoming the first storage vendor to ship 1 billion hard disk drives. It may have taken 29 years to do so but it’s still a staggering amount.

Now here’s some more mind-boggling figures to contend with. The company estimates that those drives amounted to 79 million terabytes of storage, capable of storing 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of your music. Considering how much storage most consumers now need, and how cheap it has become, Seagate believes it will only take 5 years to ship the next billion drives.

Seagate shipped it’s first drive, the ST506 [above], in 1979 and it came with 5MB of storage – about enough for one MP3, so choose really carefully.

The drive weighed 5lbs and cost around £750, or £150 per megabyte. Today, a typical drive has 500GB to 1TB of storage with the cost per megabyte at a tiny fraction of a penny.

Feel free to throw some 1TB drives this way Seagate as my 300GB external drive is fit to burst.-Martin Lynch

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