Bragadocious Seagate Boasts 1.5 Billion Hard Drives Shipped

Mac Davis once sang about the difficulties of being humble, but Davis never shipped out 1.5 BILLION hard drives. Seagate has, reaching the milestone on October 20, 2010, and somehow managed to keep mum about it for nearly an entire month. But what's most impressive about the feat is Seagate skyrocketed to the 1.5 billion threshold just 2 and a half years after shipping its 1 billionth drive.

According to Seagate's numbers, 1.5 billion hard drives equates to about 118.5 million terabytes capable of storing 237 billion hours of digital video or 1.8 trillion hours of music. But that's enough about this milestone, what's next for Seagate?


"At this rate, the 2 billion drives milestone will happen in the next 2 years, meaning what previously took 29 years to reach (1 billion drives) will only take 5 years," Seagate's Mark Wojtasiak said. "Put that into perspective... Facebook founded in 2004 reached 500 million users in 2010... 6 years. Seagate sold 500 million drives in less that half the time. Cool."

Cool indeed, and proof positive that mechanical hard drives are long for this world, at least until solid state drives (SSDs) reach pedestrian price-per-gigabyte ratios.