Seagate celebrates milestone: First to ship two billion hard drives

Shawn Knight

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Seagate is celebrating a milestone today as they claim to be the first hard drive manufacturer to ship two billion units worldwide. Perhaps more impressive, however, is the fact that it took 29 years to sell the first billion and just four years to sell the second billion according to a press release posted on Segate’s website.

The company said recent sales have been fueled by the demand for storage from mobile apps, cloud infrastructures, social media, business applications and a wide variety of consumer markets. Steve Luczo, president, CEO and chairman of Seagate said the achievement is a testament to the commitment of his employees whose relentless dedication and personal pride continue to be the fabric of the company.

seagate shipments hard drives

Looking forward, Seagate believes that user generated content like HD video and still photos will quadruple storage needs by 2015. Seagate estimates that shipments will reach 585 million units in 2013 and further noted that terabyte shipments worldwide will grow at a 30 percent compound annual growth rate through 2016.

I can remember a time when a 20GB hard drive was a massive amount of storage but of course that was before most people were creating their own digital media. Furthermore, mission critical software like the operating system consumed far less space than they used to. Even just a few short years ago, a 1TB drive seemed like complete overkill yet now many new computers ship with drives of this capacity.

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My very first PC (Apple IIe) sported two 360KB floppy drives. One for the operating system and one for storage. It was mega.
 
Is it just me or did the quality of drives drop quite dramatically. It used to be that warranty for a drive was between 3 to 5 years but now Seagate has only a year and A LOT of failures.

P.S. WD seems to also have a quality issue or perhaps Newegg because 4 out of 4 WD 1TB blacks that I ordered were DOA. (Ordered one, DOA, got a RMA, the RMA also had failed sectors so another RMA, which also had failed sectors, so finally tried another and that one also failed -- then I got a refund...).
 
Is it just me or did the quality of drives drop quite dramatically. It used to be that warranty for a drive was between 3 to 5 years but now Seagate has only a year and A LOT of failures.
P.S. WD seems to also have a quality issue or perhaps Newegg because 4 out of 4 WD 1TB blacks that I ordered were DOA. (Ordered one, DOA, got a RMA, the RMA also had failed sectors so another RMA, which also had failed sectors, so finally tried another and that one also failed -- then I got a refund...).


Seagate had 1-2 iterations of drives that had abnormally high failure rates, the 7200.10 (biggest one) and 7200.11.
The warranty is 2 years if your register with them. I've been running seagate for a long time as have had several of my friends. We all run with WD as well and frankly both brands have been doing fine at least for me. We all slipped the 7200.10 and 7200.11 though.

Both companies have bad batches that slip past QC and DOA drives are pretty random, guess you had bad luck :p
 
Had 2 Seagate drive sand after 5 years I still have them working fine. The Samsung and Hitachi drives broke within 1 year (well Samsung one is dying slowly). RMA with Hitachi... HDD got lost.

Next purchase either Seagate or WD.
 
Had 2 Seagate drive sand after 5 years I still have them working fine. The Samsung and Hitachi drives broke within 1 year (well Samsung one is dying slowly). RMA with Hitachi... HDD got lost.

Next purchase either Seagate or WD.
Yeah, it is different with everybody, I just personally dont trust them, but you do(y) . That is why we cant have monopolies haha.
 
They must be including all the warranty replacements. I have even had warranty replacements of the warranty replacements fail. After a while, it's like, "what's the point of a warranty?" Seagate... never again!
 
These are used in Dell's, from at least five years ago until today. That'd help boost numbers too.
 
Is it just me or did the quality of drives drop quite dramatically. It used to be that warranty for a drive was between 3 to 5 years but now Seagate has only a year and A LOT of failures.

P.S. WD seems to also have a quality issue or perhaps Newegg because 4 out of 4 WD 1TB blacks that I ordered were DOA. (Ordered one, DOA, got a RMA, the RMA also had failed sectors so another RMA, which also had failed sectors, so finally tried another and that one also failed -- then I got a refund...).
Drive manufacturers just put out bad drives occationally. IBM released the 'Deathstar' (Deskstar) drives about 10-12 years ago that had an incredibly high failure rate. Whoever had the 1.5TB drives out early had really high failures too, supposedly it was fixed with a firmware update, but I updated mine and it still died. (I have a lot of drives, keeping track of which ones I've RMA'd over the years is tough)
 
It's easy to sell 2 billion HDD when 1 billion of them failed in the first year and you have to go pick up another one. I wonder how many refurbs they handle if they are shipping 2 billion drives?
 
The first computer with a hard drive I used was a Macintosh SE/30. It had a 20 Meg (yes Meg) hard drive and 1 Meg of RAM. It was my dad's when the military sent him back to school for a graduate degree. The first computer I bought for myself with my money had an 8 GB Quantum Bigfoot drive. 5.25" rather than 3.5", also really loud, that computer also had 48 Megs of RAM.
 
Scumbag Seagate still doesn't standardize their S.M.A.R.T. data to match other hard drives
 
Dell uses more of WD hard drives in their business computer lines. That alone may tell you something right there.

(Source)
I open at least 10 new Optiplex/Precisions a month.

I personally do NOT trust Seagate hard drives whatsoever. I actually preferred Samsung hard drives for data storage(before seagate bought the samsung hard drive division) and WD for all other.
 
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