Archive notice: This article was originally published on April 24, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Seagate Technology is the first hard drive manufacturer to have shipped more than one billion hard drives worldwide. A breathtaking number that illustrates the enormous quantity of storage-intensive digital content being produced at home, on the move, in the office, in the car and in many other markets.
The billion Seagate hard drives shipped correspond to approximately 79 million terabytes of storage. They could store 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of music. Seagate hard drives and storage solutions enable users to create, share, use and protect more digital content every day.
Although it took 29 years to break the billion mark, Seagate announced that it would ship the next billion drives in less than five years – further evidence of its market leadership and the central role storage solutions play in today’s digital world. This means that when the next competitor ships its first billion drives, Seagate will already have almost reached its second billion.
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The billion-drive milestone is being reached at a time when hard drive shipments are rising sharply. According to the Gartner Group, more than 500 million drives were shipped last year; by comparison, the figure in 1990 was fewer than 30 million.
As its first product, Seagate presented the ST506 hard drive in 1979 with 5 megabytes of storage – equivalent to the capacity of one MP3 song. The drive weighed about 2.3 kilograms and cost US$1,500, or US$300 per megabyte. Today, a typical Seagate hard drive offers one terabyte of storage (1 million megabytes) – enough to record HD video around the clock for 32 days. The cost per megabyte is now 1/5000 of a cent (US$0.00022).
“This company has an amazing, colourful and important history that is being written every day by its 55,000 employees worldwide,” said Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate. “Al Shugart and a few buddies founded the company behind a grocery store in 1979. They enabled the birth of the first PC. Today, we are at the centre of the digital content revolution. Reaching this milestone is an important prompt for us to reflect on our achievements and those of our predecessors, and to look forward to the great things we can still accomplish as a company.”
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As a long-standing Seagate customer, HP congratulated the company on this achievement. “Only through exceptionally strong leadership, dedicated employees and shared values based on innovation, good collaboration and above-average customer service could such a milestone be reached,” said Ike Harris, Vice President of Notebook Supply Chain at HP. “These values are very similar to HP’s and reflect the strength of our partnership.”
The rapid growth of digital content will continue to come from a wide variety of sources. Analysts estimate that there are more than one billion digital cameras and camera phones worldwide, with which around 250 billion pictures were taken in 2006. Websites with user-generated content (such as Flickr and YouTube) are expected to generate more than 65 billion downloads by 2010.
“The proliferation of digital content is a long-term phenomenon,” says John Rydning, Research Director for Hard Drives at IDC. “This phenomenon is driving demand for hard drives to more than 600 million units per year by 2010, and it will continue to drive hard drive demand in the following decade.”
Further Links:
- Seagate Technology
Short Film on the Sales History:
