Infotech Lead America: Seagate Technology on Tuesday said it shipped two billion hard disk drives (HDD).
Seagate is the first hard disk drive manufacturer to achieve the 2 billion milestone in the HDD industry.
Demand for storage from mobile applications, cloud infrastructures, social media, business applications and a variety of consumer markets fueled the growth.
Seagate Technologies took 29 years to ship the first one billion units, while the storage major achieved the second billion milestone in four years.
Steve Luczo, president, CEO and chairman of Seagate, says digital content demand continues to stem from a range of sources, including social media and mobile devices, fueling the need for storage.
Analysts estimate that over 4 billion hours of user-generated content is watched each month on YouTube alone. While user generated high-definition camcorder video, still pictures, and smartphone clip sharing storage needs are expected to quadruple from 2013 to 2015.
John Rydning, IDC’s research vice president, for hard drives and semiconductors, said: “Mobile 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.”
By 2015 households which today consume 1TB of data a month are expected to generate 20 times the amount of data than they currently save.
