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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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
... 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