Seagate: 1 billion drives served

Seagate claims it's the first company to hit the magical "one billion drives shipped" mark, and doesn't plan on slowing down any time soon. The company was founded in 1979, with its first drive offering up 5MB of storage for a whopping $1,500. We've certainly come a long way in 29 years, and Seagate expects to ship its next billion drives in less than five years. Of course, with all this "cloud computing" talk we'd think drive sales have to slow down at some point, but there's certainly no sign of our GB appetites abating just yet. Now if you'll excuse us, we need to download this 7GB MMO demo to a secondary hard drive.

[Ray @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:28AM]

Coolio I've got a 400GB drive in my computer and a 4GB microgrive. Both are awesome.

[Ray @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:28AM]

Dur, and they're both Seagate.

[geekmorgan @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:49AM]

Wait... this is a hard drive manufacturer so when they get to 1,073,741,824 bytes, or 2 to the power of 30 bytes we can really celebrate.

[Langdon Alger @ Apr 22nd 2008 1:08PM]

@geekmorgan: A better version of your joke would go as follows ...

"Wait ... this is a hard drive manufacturer so when they get to 1,073,741,824 drives (1 G-drives), we can celebrate!"

Then again, hard drive manufacturers are notorious for disobeying the rules of orders of magnitude for binary numbers so there would be some lame fine print at the bottom: "(for the purposes of the sales volume, Seagate considers 1,000,000,000 drives to be a G-drive)".

[mymaclife @ Apr 22nd 2008 3:32PM]

Shame on you Engadget - cloud computing still needs data storage even if it's not on your own computer, this just moves the storage to a different location, not diminish its use!

[CcntMnky @ Apr 22nd 2008 11:49PM]

@Langdon:

I used to agree with you on the prefix thing, until someone explained it to me. Technically, the HDD industry is using the Giga prefix correctly. A Gibibyte is the IEC-approved prefix for 2^30 bytes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibi#IEC_standard_prefixes

[Gaz @ Apr 23rd 2008 1:46PM]

I got a 400GB and a 700GB Seagate external firewire HDD for free today, the delivery van guy bought them in the shop and had no idea what they were! I don't know where they came from, they don't look to be even a year old

[Mark @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:28AM]

THAT'S A LOT OF PORN

[Lazerface @ Apr 22nd 2008 11:59AM]

i think the correct term is 'pr0n'

[Orlando @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:29AM]

How about you start shipping out those 2.5" 500GB HD and later we talk about numbers.

[Dan Davis @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:35AM]

AMEN TO THAT!

[kal326 @ Apr 22nd 2008 12:37PM]

Hey I would just settle for some that don't die in 2 weeks.

I had one of my two newer 7200.11 500Gig sata drives fail and that was after I had to flash the firmware to the proper version so the drive would recognize all of the cache. Right around 2 weeks of usage and my case was alive with the sound of clicking. The other drive is still alive, but I don't put anything important on it incase it dies as well.

[JACOB @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:30AM]

i have nothing against seagate but when we got ours it did not come with the software so its a $100 paperweight
Thank you best buy for the paper weight.

[Ray @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:32AM]

Thus is the plight of entrusting Best Buy with anything whatsoever.

[Chebwa @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:36AM]

Wait... your hard drive didn't come with... the software...?

I, uh... wait, what?

[Jordan @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:39AM]

software?

[Ayle @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:42AM]

Why would your hard drive need a software???

[BigBloke @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:48AM]

...because it's hardware?

[Ignatius @ Apr 22nd 2008 11:03AM]

I have never seen an internal hard drive that requires software.

He might be talking about an external drive. However, those should just come up as a generic USB mass storage device...

[Chris @ Apr 22nd 2008 1:55PM]

You probably just need your FireDogz...

[Etrigan @ Apr 22nd 2008 11:28AM]

Mine has software on it also........it's called XP.

[Patriks7 @ Apr 22nd 2008 11:41AM]

you need a software?
thats what she said :x

[mac @ Apr 22nd 2008 1:16PM]

It's called "Plug-n-Play" for a reason...

Especially when you load it up with porn.

[Billy Fiul @ Apr 22nd 2008 1:18PM]

You have to pay extra for the software. They don't just give it away.

[Ysleiro @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:31AM]

I know this is off topic but:

Does anyone know why the system won't notify me when someone replies to my comments?

[Jordan @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:39AM]

Pay me 10 bucks an hour, and give me your phone number. I'll call you when someone replies to this.

[Ellianth @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:41AM]

Probably cause Engadget f*cked up the comment system (AGAIN.) And then they make fun of other companies. Hehe.

[Ysleiro @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:52AM]

Very funny Jordan now all you need is a way to hipnotize people and you can retire for life.. jaja..

Hey I actually got notified of this reply. I guess the problem only happens when I reply to a person's comment. A while back I remember that whenever a person replied to that same comment you replied to you would be notified

[natels @ Apr 22nd 2008 1:03PM]

If was funny. And "hypnotize."

[Andrew @ Apr 22nd 2008 1:15PM]

"If was funny"??? I love it when grammar police mess up their own snootyness, quite honestly I cold care less about it otherwise.

I have probably 15 Seagate drives, the only company I'll buy from. Keep goin Seagate!

[JACOB @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:37AM]

is "E-Mail me when someone replies to this comment" on?

[Ysleiro @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:51AM]

Yeah

It seems that the problem only happens when I reply to another person's comment. I remember that a while back whenever a person replied to a comment that you replied to too, you would get a notification letting you know that.

[Ysleiro @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:43AM]

Very funny Jordan now all you need is a way to hipnotize people and you can retire for life.. jaja..

Hey I actually got notified of this reply. I guess the problem only happens when I reply to a person's comment. A while back I remember that whenever a person replied to that same comment you replied to you would be notified

[Scott @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:49AM]

Has no one else experienced the infamous Macbook hard drive failure? My brother, his wife, and my friend all had their Macbook hard drives die after only a few months, and all of them were Seagate. I read online that it was a fairly widespread issue but no one has officially said anything about it.

[matt @ Apr 22nd 2008 11:55AM]

Yeah. Mine died, famous firmware revision from China... The heads decided to go on "one last mission" and tanked into the platters. Turns out they wer wacky in the ...head, thanks to BOGUS FIRMWARE!

Thanks quality control!

[Oinquer @ Apr 22nd 2008 1:29PM]

ohh welll your 1600 bucks should cover a new HDD...

[duffman @ Apr 22nd 2008 10:50AM]

Seagate, the McDonald's of hard disk media.

[NeilNo @ Apr 22nd 2008 11:41AM]

McSeagate!

[Bryan @ Apr 22nd 2008 11:46AM]

I still remember purchasing my first Seagate 512MB hard drive as replacement for my IBM PS/2 25 MHz with a 25 MHz OverDrive chip...12MB of RAM and Win 3.1 > Win 95. Ahhhh...memories...

[jcspradley @ Apr 22nd 2008 12:07PM]

I think they really mean 930,000,000 drives shipped.

[Kirt @ Apr 22nd 2008 12:51PM]

so many shipped because sooo many were defective = /

just got my 4th seagate rma back......second time i have rmad this drive wtf lol

[Alex Kirby @ Apr 22nd 2008 12:51PM]

Used to have seagate but not anymore. I have a 500gb Western Digital and a 500 gb Samsung Spinpoint.
I think engadget's suggestion that cloud computing will decrease hard drive sales is bull. All that data has to be stored somewhere, and a lot of time it's also backed up

[Funke, Tobias Dr. @ Apr 22nd 2008 1:08PM]

"Of course, with all this "cloud computing" talk we'd think drive sales have to slow down at some point"

Isn't the cloud essentially made up of just a bunch of disks anyway? I'm primarily thinking of Google who uses tons of off the shelf hard drives for their storage. So won't there just be a shift in who buys the disks, but not sales in general?

[Itai @ Apr 22nd 2008 7:18PM]

Cloud computing actually increases the amount of disk needed, because they need to replicate and distribute the data. That's because if your stuff breaks or is inaccessible when its under your control, that's your problem. If the cloud breaks, then you get to blame someone other than yourself ;)

[Horse @ Apr 22nd 2008 4:10PM]

At 1979 cost per Mb, my current home pc would be worth $12,000,000!

[Monkey Angst @ Apr 22nd 2008 5:49PM]

Rock on, Seagate. I remember my dad bringing home a Seagate 20MB drive for our XT clone in 1984 or 85... I can't help but wonder how much that cost, in light of finding out the price of that original 5MB drive...

[Dude #4 @ Apr 22nd 2008 7:37PM]

Anything but Seagate , makes a happy customer.

[Nelson @ Apr 23rd 2008 11:21PM]

And growing!