Seagate Ships Billionth Hard Drive

Lucas123 writes "Seagate's first drive, shipped in 1979 was the ST506, which had a capacity of 5MB and cost a cool $1,500 — or $300 per megabyte. Today, a typical Seagate holds 1TB and cost just 1/5000th of a cent ($0.0002) per megabyte. Seagate, which claims to be the first company to ship a billion drives, says all those drives amounted to 79 million terabytes of capacity, enough for 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs." Update: 04/23 14:56 GMT by CT : The quoted fraction is wrong. Someone complain to ComputerWorld. Update: 04/23 15:13 GMT by CT : TY. The site is corrected to say "just 1/50th of a cent ($0.0002) per megabyte." The universal equation is once again balanced.

Bad Sector

[kmsigel]

$0.0002 is 1/50th of a cent, not 1/5000th. Still a good value, though.

My first hard drive was a 20MB Seagate that went into my 8Mhz 8088 Sanyo PC, which was originally bought with two 360KB floppies and no hard drive. I remember feeling very lucky at the time, because while I was saving up for the hard drive (which cost ~$400 in ~1985 as I recall) the 10MB model (which I was going to get) was replaced by the 20MB model at the same price.

Wrong photo!

[pegr]

The article has a photo of a drive that's supposed to be the ST506. It looks more like an ST225, as the ST506 was full height. Jeez, you'd think Computer World would get the technical details right!

Of course, maybe you have to be over forty to know the difference... ;) Get off my lawn!

The most important unit of measurement

[Dachannien]

That's also roughly 4 million Libraries of Congress.

Yet more fudged Seagate arithmetic

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I'm guessing that they haven't sold 1 billion Seagate branded drives, but that they're including all the drives made by all the other drive companies they've bought in the past.

Re:Same as it ever was.

[ichigo 2.0]

I remember when 20MB seemed impossible to fill up [...] Today, 500GB is way more than I need for my music and movies

And after 10 years you'll be singing the same tune, and thinking that the capacity you have then is way more than you need. As computational capabilities grow, new uses for storage pop up. What that has to do with Microsoft is a mystery to me.

Re:Bad Sector

[compwizrd]

RLL encoding vs MFM.

You will be assimilated

[rubeng]

The harddisk industry does seem particularly cannibalistic, Seagate bought Maxtor, Maxtor had earlier bought Quantum, Quantum had bought a DEC storage division. Conner was a breakaway from Seagate that was aquired later on. I suppose Seagate could claim all of those drives as their own in some sense.