TAG | 1 Billion Seagate hard drives, the next will take 5 years |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Wednesday, 23 April 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 3 The explosion of digital content that’s happened over the past few years shows no signs of slowing down, while storage technologies have found their way into more devices than ever. There’s at least one hard drive in your life right now, if not several. They’re in computers, mp3 and video players, games consoles, phones, photocopiers, cars and more besides, in dozens of different markets – and the demand for storage just keeps on growing. An interesting stat Seagate shares is that the 1 billion drives they’ve shipped equate to around 79 million terabytes of storage, and while a good number of those drives no longer work, having reached the end of their useful lives, or crashed through wear and tear, the technology behind the mechanical storage of hard drives has evolved, with the latest enterprise drives able to offer 1 million hours of ‘mean time between failure’ – up from 50,000 hours only a few years ago. Seagate say that, although it has taken 29 years to reach 1 billion drives, it should only take 5 years to reach the next billion. They also boast, with pride, that by the time their closest competitor reaches its own first billion drive milestone, Seagate will have nearly reached their 2 billionth drive shipped. Seagate quotes the Gartner Group who say that “last year alone more than 500 million drives were shipped, compared to 1990, when slightly less than 30 million were shipped”. Looking back in time, Seagate’s first hard drive, the ST506 from 1979, stored 5 megabytes of data – the equivalent of one MP3 song. It weighed about five pounds and cost $1,500, or $300 per megabyte. Today, a typical Seagate hard drive offers a terabyte of data (or 1 million megabytes), which has enough capacity to record 32 days of high-definition video around the clock – at a cost of 1/5000th of a cent ($0.00022) per megabyte. So, what about the threat from solid state flash storage? Please read onto page 2. |
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