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Seagate ships 1 billionth drive

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Seagate is celebrating the shipment of its one billionth disk drive after 29 years in biz. The storage giant reckons it will reach its second billion in less than five-years' time.

Seagate said it's shipped the equivalent of 79 million terabytes of storage since the company made its first hard drive in 1979.

The ST506 hard drive

Its debut product, the ST506 hard drive, had a 5MB capacity, weighed about five pounds, and cost $1,500 (£757). Today, Seagate sells 1TB drives for under a third of that price.

The company figures its next 1,000,000,000 drives will go down easier based on the ever-increasing demand for storage. Gartner Group last year estimated more than 500 million drives were shipped worldwide, compared to about 30 million in 1990.

Seagate claimed that by the time its closest rival, Western Digital, reaches a billion drives shipped, Seagate will already be close to shipping its second billion. ®

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Latest Comments

Funny thing is

Seagate may have put out more drives, but historically there are a HELL of a lot more Western Digital and Maxtor (pre-acquisition) drives still working after 5 years. Seagate has a horrible reputation for drives that die immediately after the 3-year warranty expires. The average life of a drive is 6 years.

I work at a school with a lot of older computers, with multiple hard drive brands. I can honestly say I have not found a SINGLE working Seagate drive. The Western Digitals and Maxtors are pretty solid (Maxtors especially), but every single Seagate is dead, without fail. I don't even bother to test them anymore. I just throw them out.

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Cost of 1TB in 1979..?

If I've done my maths right, £151,400,000 - how many Rolls Royces would that have bought!

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"Facts"

Those of us blessed with the opportunity to earn an honest living in this industry are more than familiar with consumers/end-users complaining about their 200GB hard disk not showing up as 200GB in Windows. In light of this reality, one's grasp of binary, hard disk "standards", or mathematics in general is inconsequential.

You know what they say: People in glass houses sink sh... sh... sh... ships. - take note

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