The ST506 hard drive
Posted on 04/27/2008 10:38:31 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Seagate is celebrating the shipment of its one billionth disk drive after 29 years in biz. The storage giant reckons it will reach its second billion in less than five-years' time.
Seagate said it's shipped the equivalent of 79 million terabytes of storage since the company made its first hard drive in 1979.
The ST506 hard drive
Its debut product, the ST506 hard drive, had a 5MB capacity, weighed about five pounds, and cost $1,500 (£757). Today, Seagate sells 1TB drives for under a third of that price.
The company figures its next 1,000,000,000 drives will go down easier based on the ever-increasing demand for storage. Gartner Group last year estimated more than 500 million drives were shipped worldwide, compared to about 30 million in 1990.
Seagate claimed that by the time its closest rival, Western Digital, reaches a billion drives shipped, Seagate will already be close to shipping its second billion. ®
Seagate sure has done well over the years. I remember a few in the PolyCell ASIC design group I worked with at Bell Labs Allentown working on a chip set for some of their drives, back in the 80s.
I’ve seen many seagate HDs in use at work over the years, and have never seen one fail.
Always had better luck with Western Digital than Seagate.
Good for them, though.
I once took one, opened it up, put the cover back on and started the computer. It made this wonderful blue smoke, kind of like the smoke that comes out of the tailpipe of my car.
Me too, I never use anything but Western Digital anymore. Sorry Seagate, too many disk crashes in the past.
And they’re still junk. The only Drives I ever had problems with were Seagate. I’ll buy any thing but them.
I thought i was the only one...
I haven’t used Seagate HDDs in over 14 years, I only buy Western Digital myself.
The Seagates just kept on crashing and just couldn’t take it anymore.
I remember gleefully sitting at my desk in 1985 realizing that I’d never need to buy another piece of computer equipment now that I had taken delivery of my new XT Clone with two 5-1/4” floppy drives, 20 meg Seagate hard drive and Epson near letter quality dot-matrix printer. Silly me.
/grin
LOL. No, I didn't have a modem until ten years after that.
Myself? I got my first IBM compatable in 1989, a used "Datavue Spark" laptop. Before that I had a Commie 64, and before that a "Timex/Sinclair TS1000".
One of the first things after getting the Datavue was a modem, a "Premier 1200" (non-Hayes compatible), and a Compuserve membership ... and then went 'online' to explore this brave new world ...
Soon I discovered the myriad of dial-up BBS's, and frequented lots of local ones instead of Compuserve, which was way too costly by the hour. One of the local BBS's was called "The Sounding Board", which was mainly a discussion board with a politically conservative tilt to it. I fit right in on TSB, and it was a lot of fun while it lasted ... and dare I say it? Sites like FR are the Internet equivalent of what some of the old BBS's, such as Sounding Board, were like .... just discussion threads on current events, and a whole lotta fun :)
FReep On !
MM
Oh no, you aren’t the only one. I won’t use another Seagate if I can help it, and I know others who feel the same way.
You must have a computer dinosaur ping list.
I worked with multiuser CPM machines before the IBM PC came out.
They had a master/slave config with a 10 MEG Winchester drive that was about the size of a loaf of bread.
And we wrote an order entry/inventory control system for auto parts dealers that ran off that 10 meg drive. And it had an 8-inch floppy for backups.
Newb... :^)
HAY!!! I resemble that remark! /laughs
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.