Slashdot Mirror
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.
A large percentage of all that storage space has been sucked up by Windows and other binary files. Each time storage space expands considerably, Microsoft's storage demands do too. Vista starts at 10GB, roughly 1% of of the average 1TB drive, but their new indexing mechanism will suck multiples of that. "Backups" must be made of every system because of Microsoft's obnoxious registry and other anti copy technology won't allow for centralized image repositories.
Free software, by way of comparison, still takes up less than 2GB and it's always better to install fresh binaries from networked repositories. The savings in storage requirements start at an order of magnitude and get better depending on how large an organization you are. Tools like Red Hat's Global File System take advantage of all that extras storage space to provide users with high capacity and reliable storage for things that matter - the files and information created by people using their favorite tools.