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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
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.
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.
Immediately following the announcement, the MPAA and RIAA each sued Seagate for 5 quintillion dollars in contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.
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.
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
Everybody I know has some vendor they swear by, and some vendor they think is just terrible. I know people who think Western Digital is the best, and that Maxtor is crap. I know people who say the exact opposite. None of these people buy enough hard drives to have any real say in which one is better than the other. 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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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?
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.
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.
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.
They've also just celebrated receiving their half-billionth RMA hard drive.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
g=c800:5
God, why do I still remember that??
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
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.
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."
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.)
Sorry, BoP.
Noob.
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
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?
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.
I was a rascal. I have reformed.
I think what you really mean is you ran out of clever ideas.
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.