Seagate announced quite an accomplishment today publicizing that it has become the first hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturer to ship two billion HDDs. The first one billion units took the company 29 years to ship. However, since then over the last four years, Seagate has managed to ship yet another billion drives. The incredible demand for storage driven by social media, cloud storage, mobile usage, and jumps in file sizes has created the intensity in the market that has led to this achievement.
Seagate announced quite an accomplishment today publicizing that it has become the first hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturer to ship two billion HDDs. The first one billion units took the company 29 years to ship. However, since then over the last four years, Seagate has managed to ship yet another billion drives. The incredible demand for storage driven by social media, cloud storage, mobile usage, and jumps in file sizes has created the intensity in the market that has led to this achievement.
User-generated HD video, pictures, and smartphone clip storage needs are expected to quadruple in the next 2 years thanks to increasing methods for capturing these ever growing media files. Despite all of the excitement around flash storage, hard drives continue to bear the bulk of the load, driving storage vendors like Seagate to drive invest in new technologies to increase platter density and overall drive capacities, especially in the data center. For consumers, Seagate has recently updated their line of hybrid hard drives with two 2.5" notebook drives and for the first time Seagate is including 3.5" desktop drives in their hybrid line.
The industry is estimated to ship nearly 600 million drives this calendar year, which means that the 3 billionth drive might not be too far away.
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