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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.

26 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. capacity by frisket · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... or one Microsoft OOXML spec doc

  2. Obligatory Simpsons quote by smooth+wombat · · Score: 4, Funny

    Does anyone need that much porno?

    To which the answer is a resounding, YES!

    --
    We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
  3. Seagate: Over 1 Billion Sold by denverradiosucks · · Score: 2, Funny

    I would love to see a huge sign outside Seagate Headquarters similar to that of McDonald's. Anybody with Photoshop skills and in the mood to waste their time? I would love to see this.

  4. Best not to brag by russotto · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.


    Immediately following the announcement, the MPAA and RIAA each sued Seagate for 5 quintillion dollars in contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.
  5. Capacity references elude me. by Corf · · Score: 2, Funny

    At 93 ft^3 per unit, how many Volkswagen Beetles full of telephone directories does that equate to?

    --
    The pain was excruciating and the scarring is likely permanent, but that just means it's working.
  6. Makes me nostalgic too by explosivejared · · Score: 5, Funny

    ll 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."

    I remember the first time I put the whole Library of Congress on a hard drive. It brought tears to my eyes, as I felt so lucky. Of course, this was in 2007, so I still had a few hundred more gigs to fill up with wares and music. Still it was an important experience.

    --
    I got a catholic block.
    1. Re:Makes me nostalgic too by UncleTogie · · Score: 2, Funny

      Ah yes... The days of MFM hard drives, when real mem low-level formatted their drives, and Steve Gibson was relevant...

      ...let's not forget the brief period after that where Real Men learned that early IDE drives did NOT like a low-level formatting...

      Only took one drive to learn that lesson...

      --
      Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
  7. Units? by sootman · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wait... is that their 1,000,000,000the hard drive, or their 1,073,741,824th?

    --
    Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
  8. Re:mp3s by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Funny

    1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs

    ... illegally

    With statutory damages of $150,000 per CD, it looks like the RIAA has been cheated out of at least $1.8e17 in revenue. No wonder the music industry is hurting.

  9. FDISK, PART, FORMAT /S by FurtiveGlancer · · Score: 2, Funny

    I thought nostalgia was remebering the good times?

    --
    Invenio via vel creo
  10. hay! how much is that in... by revlayle · · Score: 4, Funny

    Library of Cong... no wait... was done

    How about a beowulf clus.... no... no makes no sense.
    Heh, I, for one, welcome our large-capacity-cheap-per-megabyte-storage.... argh


    ok fine - no one wants to hear it!

    DOES IT FUCKING RUN LINUX?

    1. Re:hay! how much is that in... by mwvdlee · · Score: 2, Funny

      In soviet russia, bad jokes make you!

      --
      Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
  11. Re:Having purchased a few Seagate products... by Qzukk · · Score: 5, Funny

    Google probably buys enough drives, but they don't buy the consumer level desktop drives either, so I don't know if I'd trust their opinion much either.

    Yeah, they only buy the secret black market drives that were forged with the blood of a newborn goat and never fail, but smell faintly like souls burning whenever they spin up.

    --
    If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
  12. a still cant find last week's email by peter303 · · Score: 2, Funny

    5MB or 500GB.

  13. Milestones by Rob+T+Firefly · · Score: 4, Funny

    They've also just celebrated receiving their half-billionth RMA hard drive.

  14. Re:Hackable too! by Amarok.Org · · Score: 2, Funny

    g=c800:5

    God, why do I still remember that??

    --
    -- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
  15. Change of Logo by alcmaeon · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now they can change their logo to say "Over a Billion Platters Served."

  16. 142 Million Wind Chimes! by starglider29a · · Score: 2, Funny

    I tore an ST-238 apart after it died the 3rd time. The two platters were SO BEAUTIFUL, their iridescent copper color. And they rang like bells when you suspended them. Those and a couple more modern, smaller, silvery drives and they make the most lovely wind chimes.

    Now, I'm trying to figure out how to coat my bike tank in that coloration.

  17. Re:1tb = typical? by Thanshin · · Score: 4, Funny

    I find that hard to believe. Looking around their products pages, it appears that 1TB is the highest capacity offered for some of their models. Am I just missing something? Yes.

    Customer: "I want one of those congress library storing things for the computing machine I bought for my kid".
    A: "What capacity? 1 Tb is the typical size. Less than that and you risk your kid turning gay overnight. And die."
  18. Re:Hackable too! by Fast+Thick+Pants · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hell yes... got a 30 megabyte drive that way, which lasted about a month. (But I didn't even need it for that long; I just wanted it make a 30 megabyte text file containing nothing but spaces. This was ARCed twice and ended up at 50k or so, and reserved as a "poison pill" upload for to DOS an unfriendly BBS that had a script in place to convert all ARCs to ZIPs. I was a rascal. I have reformed.)

  19. Re:Bad Sector by BigBlueOx · · Score: 4, Funny

    Zenith Z150 ...

    Oh YES! My Z150 r0Qd! Mine had a off-brand "hard card" which, for all you punks who were born in the Clinton administration, was a unbranded Seagate MFM hard drive mounted on an IDE expansion card. I forget why.

    Oh, and it was 30 megs!! Awesome! Actually, it was a 20 meg drive but there was some trick they did with the old MFM drives to make 20 meg drives hold 30 megs. I forget what it was.

    That machine was mondo kewel. Had CGA graphics too! I forget what happened to it.

    Let me tell you some more about the old days.
    Where are you going?
    Get back here!

  20. Re:Bad Sector by Geldon · · Score: 2, Funny

    $0.0002 is 1/50th of a cent, not 1/5000th

    Not if you work for Verizon:
    http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html
  21. Re:Having purchased a few Seagate products... by ichigo+2.0 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Sorry, BoP.



    Noob.

  22. Useless analogies by brunes69 · · Score: 2, Funny

    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."

    How many libraries of congress per VW Beetle is that?

  23. Re:mp3s by pclminion · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yeah. I remember the last time I lost $180 thousand trillion. Man, that sucked.

  24. Re:Hackable too! by Wescotte · · Score: 3, Funny

    I was a rascal. I have reformed.

    I think what you really mean is you ran out of clever ideas.