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.

Comments

Re:Makes me nostalgic too

[EvilNTUser]

How much is that in football fields?

Seriously, though, I don't understand why people feel the need to simplify things in slashdot submissions. Why would you write "79 million terabytes" when the proper way is both more understandable and more concise. Just say 79 exabytes or even just 79 EB. News for nerds, ok? We didn't smoke our way through high school.

Similarly, it would be more useful to define a quality level for some well known video codec and estimate how many hours that would be instead of just giving us a semirandom number. Not that even that is necessary, since the real news is Seagate's achievement.

The submitter shouldn't feel like I'm targeting him specifically. I just wish more people would take advantage of the fact that people on this site should have a basic understanding of things like SI prefixes. It would just be a nice touch to make things that small bit more readable.