Six Things You May Not Know About Seagate and Storage Hard Drives

1. Since the introduction of hard disk drives in 1956, data density (the number of bits packed within a square inch of hard drive space) has increased ten thousand-fold and the price per megabyte has decreased a thousand times. If automobiles had matched

2. Since its inception in 1979, Seagate has shipped about 907 million hard drives. Laid end to end, the drives would stretch 12.5 times around Earth.

3. Seagate’s first hard drive, built in 1979, was a 5.25-inch model with a total capacity of 5MB and platters spinning 3,600 times per minute. The drive could read or write more than 12 records, spread randomly over the disk, in less than a second. In 200

4. Seagate invested $904 million in R&D in fiscal 2007, the biggest commitment to research and development in the industry and equivalent to the total estimated wealth of John D. Rockefeller.

5. By 2012, Seagate estimates that the industry could ship 374 exabytes of storage — a 440 percent increase from 2007. One exabyte is equal to 1 quintillion bytes. Seagate itself could ship 300 million hard drives per year, some 10 drives per second, acc

6. In fiscal 2007 (July 2006 through June 2007), Seagate’s robot-powered factories churned out 159 million hard drives, a clip of:

• 435,616 drives per day
• 18,150 drives per hour
• 302 drives per minute
• 5 drives per second

• Presto, Storage!
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