Seagate has announced that it has shipped a billion hard drives since pioneering an industry that shows no signs of slowing down 29 years later.
In 1979, the company was a trailblazer in hard drives that were small enough for the early PCs then emerging. Its first product, the ST506, was 5.25 inches (13.3 cm) wide and weighed about 5 pounds (2.27 kg). It was compact compared with the 14-inch and 8-inch drives that had been standard up to that time.
What Seagatge has shipped already has amounted to 79 million terabytes, enough for 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs. Neither of those existed in 1979, possibly because the ST506 would have held only about one song.
Seagate ships 111,600 terabytes every day, according to the company, which means more than a terabyte of Seagate storage is produced every second.