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.
posted Apr 22nd 2008 10:25AM
Coolio I've got a 400GB drive in my computer and a 4GB microgrive. Both are awesome.
Dur, and they're both Seagate.
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.
@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)".
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!
@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
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
THAT'S A LOT OF PORN
i think the correct term is 'pr0n'
How about you start shipping out those 2.5" 500GB HD and later we talk about numbers.
AMEN TO THAT!
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.
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.
Thus is the plight of entrusting Best Buy with anything whatsoever.
Wait... your hard drive didn't come with... the software...?
I, uh... wait, what?
software?
Why would your hard drive need a software???
...because it's hardware?
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...
You probably just need your FireDogz...
Mine has software on it also........it's called XP.
you need a software?
thats what she said :x
It's called "Plug-n-Play" for a reason...
Especially when you load it up with porn.
You have to pay extra for the software. They don't just give it away.
I know this is off topic but:
Does anyone know why the system won't notify me when someone replies to my comments?
Pay me 10 bucks an hour, and give me your phone number. I'll call you when someone replies to this.
Probably cause Engadget f*cked up the comment system (AGAIN.) And then they make fun of other companies. Hehe.
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
If was funny. And "hypnotize."
"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!
is "E-Mail me when someone replies to this comment" on?
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.
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
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.
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!
ohh welll your 1600 bucks should cover a new HDD...
Seagate, the McDonald's of hard disk media.
McSeagate!
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...
I think they really mean 930,000,000 drives shipped.
so many shipped because sooo many were defective = /
just got my 4th seagate rma back......second time i have rmad this drive wtf lol
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
"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?
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 ;)
At 1979 cost per Mb, my current home pc would be worth $12,000,000!
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...
Anything but Seagate , makes a happy customer.
And growing!