Seagate ships a billion drives

79 million terabytes of storage

23 April 2008 16:22 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

Seagate Technology has announced that it is the first hard drive manufacturer worldwide to have shipped one billion hard drives.

The company says the one billion hard drives Seagate has delivered equates to approximately 79 million terabytes, able to store 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of music.

Seagate says that although it took 29 years to reach the billion milestone, the company will ship its next billion in less than 5 years.

In a nice then-and-now comparison, in 1979, Seagate's first product, the ST506 hard drive, could store five megabytes of data or the equivalent of one MP3 song. The drive weighed about 5lbs and cost $1500, or $300 per megabyte.

Today, a typical Seagate hard drive offers a terabyte of data (or 1 million megabytes), which has enough capacity to record 32 days of high-definition video - at a cost of 1/5000th of a cent ($0.00022) per megabyte.