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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.
$0.0002 is 1/50th of a cent, not 1/5000th. Still a good value, though.
My first hard drive was a 20MB Seagate that went into my 8Mhz 8088 Sanyo PC, which was originally bought with two 360KB floppies and no hard drive. I remember feeling very lucky at the time, because while I was saving up for the hard drive (which cost ~$400 in ~1985 as I recall) the 10MB model (which I was going to get) was replaced by the 20MB model at the same price.
... or one Microsoft OOXML spec doc
um no, movies and porn..er and porn movies
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
The article has a photo of a drive that's supposed to be the ST506. It looks more like an ST225, as the ST506 was full height. Jeez, you'd think Computer World would get the technical details right!
;) Get off my lawn!
Of course, maybe you have to be over forty to know the difference...
That's also roughly 4 million Libraries of Congress.
... let me know when they ship their billionth working hard drive. Sounds harsh, but I have not had any luck with their gear. Could just be me. Could be Oklahoma is where they send all their crappy stuff. I could be a Chinese jet pilot!
Seriously tho, kudos for moving that much hardware.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
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?
Either way, congrats to Seagate, it is a very remarkable milestone.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
It's funny how it always seems as if the next drive we purchase offers virtually limitless and impossible to use storage space but is never really enough.
While todays hard drives may be much larger, its not going to be long before we move on. I remember when I got my first 100mb HD and thinking "wow this is it ill never need any more storage than this". But now we know that as HD capacity increases so will the features and size software and media. Think of how big the first windows distro was and how big Vista is. Soon we'll all have HD DVD rips and real life quality music filling our new 100TB HDs
;)
In short, we as consumers don't need to worry about how to use this multitude of ever expanding space; software and media companies will do it for us.
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.
the better question: how much of the wikipedia entries is it?
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
Which is pretty amazing when you think about it. Currently, 1/2 terabyte drives are the norm. I remember buying a computer 10 years ago, and 4 GB was more than enough. Things certainly have changed since the early days.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Immediately following the announcement, the MPAA and RIAA each sued Seagate for 5 quintillion dollars in contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.
The amount of space demanded by my film and lossless (FLAC) audio collection dwarf anything that a Windows operating system would.
I spoke too soon, seems it's almost 4 million of them.
Is it just me, or do you hate it when people say "Is it just me..."?
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.
I'm guessing that they haven't sold 1 billion Seagate branded drives, but that they're including all the drives made by all the other drive companies they've bought in the past.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
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.
They've only shifted 0.931 gibiharddrives.
Any one else remember using an RLL controller with an MFM drive to get 50% more capacity? (And 200% more failures? ;)
Don't get me started on Perstor controllers... Those things were voodoo...
Tell that to my ISOs folder.
in the "Library of Congress" and "Football Field" units ?
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
158 billion hours is a shade over 18 million years. If you had a camera fixed to record for the past 18 million years you'd only have started in the Miocene era ... it'd all look really quite modern. It'd have been a bit more grassy, but there'd be recognisable mammals like deer and wolves, birds like ducks and grouse.
It sounds a like long time, but it really isn't.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
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.
I thought nostalgia was remebering the good times?
Invenio via vel creo
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You must be new here. :P
My first hard drive was a Seagate. All 20MB of it. For $500.
It was for my Mac SE. You were supposed to remove one of the 800K floppies to install it but I left both floppy drives in and still managed to squeeze the drive into place. I remember thinking that it was a pretty neat hack. Then I promptly partitioned the drive into two 10MB chunks and copied ALL of my floppies at the time onto ONE of the partitions and ran a BBS off the other one.
Now I feel old, thanks.
- SR
Yeah, but nobody expected to be ripping entire DVD collections to HD for use in a media server back then. Now it's economical to do it, especially if you've already got a PC doing DVR work. At less than 20c/GB, it's less than a dollar to rip a typical movie (without the extras and ads) to a server. That compares favorably to putting discs into a jukebox, and has the advantage of speed and playing multiple streams at once.
Now that HD content is out, we need the capacities to go up another order of magnitude so that storing HD is as easy*/cheap as SD.
*I buy discs, but download the rips. My setup is only 720p, so it's easier to get someone else's recode at 720p than do it myself, and it takes less space on my server. With 2TB in DVDs and recorded content off TiVo/OTA, I'm always worried about bumping into the limit on my unRaid box and having to buy more drives.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
79 million TB = 75.340271 exabytes. this might be the size of the internet. anyway, that just tells you how much data we have
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
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?
Just thinking about how much of that storage is filled by redundant data blows my mind. It seems like such an inefficient structure. Imagine how much could be saved if there was only one copy of each song (lossless, why not), each movie, etc, and instead the trillions of dollars spent on storage, we spent slightly less trillions to build up massive networking infrastructure and a few server farms that make it all accessible on the fly. Obviously unrealistic, but a fascinating idea. I have approaching 2.5TB of media at home, but the vast majority of it just sits there essentially never used. I only need it locally because my home network has the bandwidth to access it whenever I want. But even so, I only use a small part of that bandwidth an hour or two a day at most. Getting rid of redundant storage could realistically reduce storage needs 99% (ever see a torrent with 100 seeds? All the time), and bandwidth consumption wouldn't be too many times greater (by some measures) than YouTube uses, because by far most of the time we aren't consuming highly dense media. You'd need a world with completely free culture, though. Just a thought.
Their lawyers must work out the royalties, but consumers get a very nice copyright exemption. Dunno about P2P, but it might also be covered.
5MB or 500GB.
I'd really like to know how many of those thousands of terabytes were from the last year or two.
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They've also just celebrated receiving their half-billionth RMA hard drive.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Now they can change their logo to say "Over a Billion Platters Served."
This makes me wonder how many of those drives are leeching heavy metals into the ground water tables while they rot in landfills or metal scrappers in China. Computer HDDs have to be one of THE most wasteful consumer electronic devices ever created.
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.
Looked up the ST506 specs. 3600 rpm and 612 tracks. Thus I calculate it can read 60 tracks/sec or about 500 kbytes/sec or 10 secs to read the entire disk. Current 1 Tb disk drives can read about 50 Mb/sec which means to read the entire disk would take about 20,000 secs or about 6 hours. Didn't find how much it weighed but recall these old drives weighed somewhat around 10 lbs and actual MTBF was about 1 year for an office environment. Also recall computer had to wait 5-10 secs on boot up for drive to get up to speed. The specs for the ST-506 had a date of 1990. Of course then the internet was a twinkle in Al Gore's eye.
When 1024 = 1000 to them, we should be surprised by other bits of fuzzy math.
...how many seconds?
Anybody know what data storage measurements are in the Potrzebie system?
It's the only one I understand any more...
Even since decent filesystems were invented, a law of computing has been, "Data expands to fill the space available". Now a client is pestering me to use S3 for backup.
Also, as others have quite succinctly pointed out, you've obviously never properly filled up a hard drive if you really think Windows takes any appreciable percentage of your space.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
It is interesting that Seagate seems to be boasting about quantity, they should be thinking about quality first.
RMA's shouldn't count.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
10GB??? Mine only takes up two, and includes open office, an apache web server, mysql, gimp, full dev environment, and a bunch of other tools I can't even recall at the moment. All with a lovely gui interface that never breaks. The 100+ day uptime is pretty sweet too.
Oh come off it, I hate Microsoft as much as anyone else, but even if the complaint was valid, ths isn't a page for bashing MS.
This is a page for bashing seagate.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
Just wondering how you arrive at your conclusion.
AFAIK, hard drives don't use any more toxic materials than any other consumer electronics, and in many cases outlast the computers they are installed in. They also perform a useful function better and more economically than any other alternative at present.
If you want to talk about wasteful consumer electronics, crap like remote controls for car stereos, USB-powered electric pencil sharpeners, or LED-studded kid's shoes seem to beat hard drives hands down.
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... we called a 5.25 hard drive a "mini-winnie" since the established 8 inch hard drive at that time was called a Winchester .
Back then the two CP/M Z-80 "micro computers" at university lab where I did my class work used 8 inch floppies. Real floppy disk Users dismissed mini floppies not only because of it's paltry storage capacity but because some pinhead decided to reduce the disk rotation speed of the mini floppy by one half thus reducing its data transmission rate. At least that's how I remember it.
Some other graybeard is gonna have to take over for me now cuz I gotta go chase some kids off my lawn...
"Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
To put that into perspective, that is $180,000 Trillion Dollars, or approximately 100 times larger than the annual budget of the United States ($2-3 Trillion) ref.
To put it in a different perspective, each of the Internet's approximately Three Billion users (based on estimates I have seen that ~50% of the world is connected) would only have to illegally download 400 songs to serve up that type of damage.
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...of the 1 billionth seagate HDD?
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?
Woot! My first flamebait listing on slashdot. *sniff* Where do I go to pick up my reward? You thought the tribe of Apple was unforgiving, wait till you make fun of Seagate and suggest they're less than perfect.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs... illegally
Hmm. When will the MPAA and RIAA sue Seagate for enabling piracy all these years?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
I am underwhelmed to see Seagate joining the cadre of consumer electronics companies that insist on describing storage capacity as 'No. Of Songs' (128Kbps CD Quality of course) Ever since they bought Maxtor.. I've been suspicious of their strategies.
Man, I remember in the early 90's being given the manual for the ST506 drive controller so I could write the "bare metal" interface to actually write the drivers for an OS my prof was writing for his research work.
:-P
Pretty cool shit, push bytes into a couple of registers to make the damned thing seek to a given track. Service the interrupt. Push in a couple of other bytes to cause a sector read. Service the interrupt. It didn't get any lower-level than that.
We specifically avoided the Linux code at the time since we didn't want to GPL our code or use their implementation.
Writing my own low-level device driver for accessing hard-drives was pretty cool. Before long, I had written a bunch of the simple UNIX command-tools for DOS -- ls, rm, cat, cp. Boot out the DOS handler, read the raw FAT data off the HD, format it, and interpret it.
*sigh* Anyway, this is apropos to nothing. Just waxing nostalgic about a university project 20 odd years ago. It's all been downhill from then.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Yeah. I remember the last time I lost $180 thousand trillion. Man, that sucked.
A year of so, I reckon. Some time around April 1st 2009...
-1 not first post
I got it as part of a Novell 2010 Executive Workstations. Do you remember when Novell was a computer company? Back in the late '70s and early '80s? The 2010 ran CP/M, it had a 4MHz z80 with 64K of error correcting memory. (Yeah, hardware error correction built in.) The video display was another processor (IIRC) that was used to emulate a Tektronix 4XXX (don't remember the version) graphics terminal. The thing came with either an 8 inch or a 5.25 inch media unit that contained a floppy and a hard drive. I went for the 5.25 inch unit and so I had a full height floppy and full height ST506 hard drive.
:-)
5 Megabytes... WOW! I never was able to fill that sucker up. I used it for several years in the early '80s. It was my second personal computer. The first one with any kind of disk drive. I bought it with Turbo Pascal preinstalled on the hard drive. I wrote a mini-lisp interpreter using that. I still have an 8 inch floppy with Turbo Pascal on it. I also wrote a FORTH compiler on the thing that was sold under the trade name FAST FORTH. I got a lot of use out of the ST506.
The disk controller flaked out and Novell had become a software company so I was without a computer for a while. I bought a used Amiga 1000 as my 3rd personal computer. It was a real disappointment....
On the other hand I was able to sell the still working ST506 for a couple of hundred bucks to a guy whose company built ST506 compatible disk controllers for the IBM PC.
The thing was big, and heavy, and felt as solid as a battleship.
Wow... talk about ancient memories.
Stonewolf
The headline reminded me of this story:
Back in the day (1985-ish), a disk drive company called MiniScribe got caught for *shipping palettes of bricks* (I'm talking about baked clay here people) in order to make their quarterly sales numbers.
Build your Library of Congress out of that, sonny.
Terra-cotta-bytes indeed.
And what, exactly, does this have to do with the current thread? Pay more attention to where and what you post, and stop whining about conspiracies.
Nearly 30 years to ship 79TB, and in 2 years from now, they can easily ship 200TB.
Minti: What's that huge shuriken in your back?! Kin: It's the instrument of my victory.
or "Seagate: Providing a repository for Spam since 1979"
The harddisk industry does seem particularly cannibalistic, Seagate bought Maxtor, Maxtor had earlier bought Quantum, Quantum had bought a DEC storage division. Conner was a breakaway from Seagate that was aquired later on. I suppose Seagate could claim all of those drives as their own in some sense.
Oh God. Did I just see Twitter come forth with honesty? You should have explained that earlier... No, I haven't been one of the ACs trolling you.
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
1/50 cents/Mb
When you consider the sheer amount of information required for a person to cope with reality, that's still a costly amount for computing. There are anecdotes of people under hypnosis being able to recall minute details of what they've seen even though these details would hardly rate any attention. The mind may well be storing high definition video of everything you see--how much storage would that require?
If an AI were to build an idea of its environment from video, audio, and tactile inputs, Seagate's first hard disks would have been fairly prohibitive, but hard disks for PCs might be on the thresholds of affordability.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Of the alleged billion disks, no doubt the majority of them are now defunct. Dead. Gone to the Big Backup in The Sky.
So what becomes of them? Landfill? Recycled? Shipped to poor schools in 3rd-world countries where they become a SEP?
What is the cost of dead-disk handling, and was it factored into the storage-cost numbers? I mean, when it comes to nukes, we sure as hell factor in the cost of handling the waste product, if not hte cost of decommissioning the reactor at the end of its lifespan, so why not the same measure for disk drives?
"On a clear disk you can seek forever"
--/usr/bin/fortune
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling