Seagate Technology (News - Alert), a provider in the design, manufacturing and marketing of hard disc drives and storage solutions, announced today that it is the first hard drive manufacturer worldwide to have shipped 1 billion hard drives. This number is not only staggering in size but it also represents the massive amount of digital content being created in the home, hand, office, car and across dozens of other markets. 

So, what does this mean? Well, consider this: the 1 billion hard drives Seagate has delivered equals approximately 79 million terabytes, able to store 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of your favorite music. This digital content explosion creates huge growth in demand for storage. Seagate is now shipping 111,600 terabytes each day, which equals over 1 terabyte of storage every second. 

In 1979, Seagate’s first product, the ST506 hard drive, could store 5 megabytes of data or the equivalent of one MP3 song. The drive weighed about five pounds and cost $1,500, or $300 per megabyte. Today, a typical Seagate hard drive offers a terabyte of data (or one million megabytes), which has enough capacity to record 32 days of high-definition video around the clock and only costs 1/5000th of a cent ($0.00022) per megabyte. By comparing today’s numbers to the past, it’s easy to see just how far technology has come.

Seagate’s billionth drive milestone comes as hard drive shipments continue to increase dramatically. According to the information technology research and advisory company, Gartner (News - Alert) Group, more than 500 million drives were shipped last year, compared to 1990, when less than 30 million were shipped.

Seagate projects that although it took 29 years to reach the 1 billion milestone, the company predicts it will ship its next billion in less than five years. Also, by the time its nearest competitor reaches 1 billion drives shipped, Seagate will already be close to shipping its second billion. Not bad for a company that started behind a convenience store.

The rapid growth of digital content continues to come from a wide range of sources. Analysts estimate that there are over 1 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 (News - Alert)) will produce 65 billion downloads/views by 2010.

“Digital content proliferation is a long-term phenomenon,” according to John Rydning, Research Director for hard drives at IDC (News - Alert), a global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. “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.”

For more information on this important milestone, please go to the website: http://1b.seagatestorage.com/.