Since Seagate started shipping its first hard disks 29 years ago, it has now shipped its billionth hard disk. According to the PC World report, hard disks have made a lot of improvements over the years. For those who remember when hard disks finally reached the 1GB barrier or maybe even the 100MB barrier, Seagate's first hard disk, the ST506, was a 5.25" drive, weighed about 5lbs (2.27kg) and had a capacity of just 5MB. As a result, disk space was certainly a hefty premium back then, since at US$1,500 for the hard disk, this works out at $300 per megabyte. Even the cache in some of today’s CPUs is larger than this!
Seagate currently leads the hard disk market with it reaching a 35% market share last year and the company claims to be the first to ship 1 billion hard disks. Western Digital is its nearest competitor with a 23% market share. The rate at which Seagate is shipping hard disks has grown to such an extent that it expects to ship another billion within five years.
According to Seagate, the billion hard disks it has shipped amounts to 79 million terabytes worth of capacity (79EB). When Seagate first started shipping hard disks in 1979, they were primarily used for storing documents, but then again, that's not surprising considering that its first 5MB hard disk would have only held one average size MP3! Now with the major growth in PVRs and personal storage devices such as external hard disks, not to mention that the majority of the population now has one or more PCs, the company expects a massive growth in demand over the next five years.
While Solid State Disks (SSDs) have now entered the market as a potential hard disk replacement, Seagate's analyst Rydning predicts that it will take five years for these to gain a significant market share in laptops due to their very high price.
Last year, around 505 million hard disks have been shipped in total between the hard disk vendors. The total capacity between these amounts to 84 million terabytes (84EB), with the average capacity being 170GB. This figure is expected to reach 600 million by 2010. Seagate ships an average of 111,600TB worth of hard disks per day, working out at a rate of 1TB per second.
