1 Billion Seagate hard drives, the next will take 5 years

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 23 April 2008 17:01

Opinion and Analysis

Long-time Seagate customer, HP, congratulated the company on this achievement. “Reaching this milestone could only be possible through exceptionally strong leadership, committed employees and deep corporate values that focus on innovation, collaboration and delivering superior customer service,” said Ike Harris, VP of notebook supply chain at HP. “These values are very consistent with HP’s and this alignment reflects the strength of our partnership.”

The rapid growth of digital content continues to come from a wide range of sources. For example, analysts estimate that there are over one billion digital still and phone cameras in the world and that those devices accounted for 250 billion created images in 2006. It is predicted that user-generated content sites (like Flickr and YouTube) will produce 65 billion downloads/views by 2010.

“Digital content proliferation is a long-term phenomenon,” according to John Rydning, IDC’s Research Director for hard drives. “This phenomenon is pushing demand for hard drives to more than 600 million units per year by 2010 and will continue to fuel hard drive demand in the decade ahead.”

So, unless you decide to only use flash storage technologies, hard drives are set to be a part of our lives in some form for many years to come.

Let’s just hope we never need to implant them in our brains, like Johnny Mnemonic. When that inevitably happens, it’ll probably be racetrack equipped flash – or likely one of its speedier and more capacious successors.