Seagate Breaches Two Billion HDDs Milestone

Storage is big business and Seagate is the living proof.

Today, Seagate announced that it has become the first Hard Disk Drive (HDD) manufacturer to ship more two billion HDDs.  Seagate's recent growth is indicative of the importance of storage in today's digital world;  it took the company 29 years to ship their first billion units, while they were able to achieve the next billion in a mere 4 years.

Data Consumption Going Forward

The rapid growth is a result of our expanding demand for storage from a plethora of sources, including social media and mobile devices. According to analysts this demand is only expected to increase. Currently, roughly 4 billion hours of user-generated content is viewed on YouTube each month alone, and with user generated high-definition camcorder video, still pictures, and smartphone clip sharing, storage needs are expected to quadruple over the next two years.

Mobile devices and cloud storage are also expected to have a big impact on future storage demands as well. According to John Ryding, IDC's research vice president, for hard drives and semiconductors;  "[m]obile devices and the cloud are coming together to drive ongoing demand for hard disk drives, with shipments reaching more than 585 million units in 2013, and hard disk drive Terabyte shipments worldwide growing at a 30 percent 2012-2016 compound annual growth rate."

Households in general are expected to generate far more data than ever before. According to Richard Doherty, research director of the Envisioneering Group, "[b]y 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."

With data consumption expected to expand exponentially in the near future, Seagate may be celebrating 3 billion HDDs sold before you know it.