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Seagate Ships Billionth Hard Drive

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the ok-how-much-pron-is-that-now dept.

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.

4 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. yes, but how many libraries of congress is that? by Grokmoo · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Strange that they use such antiquated units of measure as hours of video or MP3 songs. Clearly, the useful measure would be Libraries of Congress (LoCs).

  2. Yea, but how many... by Lectoid · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Library of Congresses is that?

    --
    Is it just me, or do you hate it when people say "Is it just me..."?
  3. LoC by Sean0michael · · Score: 0, Redundant

    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."
    Who cares? Those units of measure are completely irrelevant. I want to know how many Library Of Congress' all those drives can store.
    --
    Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
  4. Re:a still cant find last week's email by AndrewNeo · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Well, if you used some sort of search indexing, a 5MB drive would take less time to index than a 500GB drive..