Way back in 1980, storage manufacturer Seagate (formerly Shugart Technology) released their first hard drive, the ST-506 which packed a whopping 5MB of storage in its 5.25inch frame. The drive proved to be a huge success and seen a 10MB version was released. The success of these drives was to be shown as they featured as sole OEM drive supplier for the worlds first personal computer to contain a hard drive from IBM.
Move forward a few years and Seagate have achieved numerous milestones including the introduction of the first drive with a 7200RPM spindle speed back in 1991 (still the standard today) and later in mid 1993, the company celebrated the shipping of 50 million drives.
Later on in 1996 Seagate came out with another industry first with a 10,000 RPM drive, a speed that again is still used today. Moving past the 250 million mark in 1999 and through to the next century, technology has come a long way and in huge leaps as well, Seagate took the speed factor to the next step with their 15k RPM drive and over the next five years they would go on to sell over 10 million of these units.
Moving into more recent times, and with data becoming more and more critical for not just businesses, but also home users alike, we’ve seen a boom in drive capacity, with current drives now rolling out with 4TB of storage – that’s 838860 times the capacity of the companies first drive way back in 1980. But to go one step further, the rate at which drives are having to be made has has to increase substantially and since Seagate passed the one billionth shipment back in 2009, the rate of sales has rocketed and in the last four years alone, sales have been for an additional one billion units, putting another milestone on the companies roadmap.
Seagate estimate that the rate of data consumption is going to continue to grow at an exponential rate and for users that continuously use 1TB of data per month are in the next two years expected to be generating twenty times the amount that they currently do. Thanks to research that Seagate announced last year, with the possibility of drive data density to become greater and greater as they demonstrate a unit with 1TB/square inch, with the chance of scaling this to 60TB in the next 15 years or so, we should still see the humble hard drive a critical part of our day to day life even as solid state storage stands to take priority in the modern tech environment.
