Since they first were used commercially in 1956, Hard Disk Drives have seen exponential growth in capacity, with some models capable of storing multiple terabytes of data. The number of HDD units sold have seen a similar arc as demand has risen with the more widespread usage of personal computers, social media, mobile applications and cloud computing.
This rise in demand is nowhere more evident than with Seagate Technology, which announced today that it has become the first hard disk drive manufacturer to ship two billion HDDs. While that number is staggering in its own right, what makes it even more impressive is the fact that it took 29 years to sell the first billion and just 4 years for the second billion.
And that growth isn’t expected to tail off anytime soon.
“By 2015 households which today routinely consume 1TB of data a month are expected to generate 20 times the amount of data than they currently save,” said Richard Doherty, research director of the Envisioneering Group in a press release from Seagate. “Consumer’s continued appetites for securely saving and organizing high-definition multimedia requires higher performance and the most trusted and dependable drives.”
Seagate HDDs, which are used in many OWC solutions and DIY kits, have been sold since 1980, with the one billionth HDD shipping in 2008.
