Seagate today became the world's first company to ship 1 billion hard disk drive since its inception in 1979. So how much information Seagate has delivered in these 29 years? The 1 billion Seagate hard drives equates to approximately 79 million terabytes, able to store 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of your favorite music! And in all these years, Seagate has certainly come of age. In 1979, Seagate’s first product, the ST506 hard drive, could store 5 megabytes of data or the equivalent of one MP3 song. The drive weighed about five pounds and cost $1,500, or $300 per megabyte. Today, a typical Seagate hard drive offers a terabyte of data, which has enough capacity to record 32 days of high-definition video around the clock – at a cost of 1/5000th of a cent ($0.00022) per megabyte.

Seagate projects that although it took 29 years to reach the 1 billion milestone, the company will ship its next billion in less than five years. Also, by the time its nearest competitor reaches 1 billion drives shipped, Seagate will already be close to shipping its second billion.

“This company has an amazing, colorful and important history, which continues to be written every day by our 55,000 employees around the world,” said Bill Watkins, Seagate CEO. “Al Shugart and a few others started the company behind a convenience store in 1979 and enabled the birth of the first PCs. Today we’re at the center of the digital content revolution. So reaching this milestone is a great opportunity for us to reflect on our accomplishments and those of our predecessors, and to also look forward to the great things we can still achieve as a company.”