Seagate ships one billion hard drives

New Delhi

June 4, 2008

Seagate Technology announced that it is the first hard drive manufacturer
worldwide to have shipped one billion hard drives. The one billion hard drives
Seagate has delivered equates to approximately 79 million terabytes, able to
store 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of users favorite
music-and Seagate hard drives and storage solutions enable people to create,
share, enjoy and protect more digital content every day.

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

Seagate's billionth drive milestone comes as hard drive shipments continue
to increase dramatically. According to Gartner Group, last year alone more than
500 million drives were shipped, compared to 1990, when slightly less than 30
million were shipped.

In 1979, Seagate's first product, the ST506 hard drive, could store five
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 (or one million megabytes), 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.

“This company has an amazing, colorful and important history, which
continues to be written every day by our 55,000 employees around the world. 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,” said
Ban Seng Teh, MD-Asia-Pacific, Seagate.

The rapid growth of digital content continues to come from a wide range of
sources. For example, analysts estimate that there are over one billion digital
still and phone cameras in the world and that those devices accounted for 250
billion created images in 2006. It is predicted that user-generated content
sites (like Flickr and YouTube) will produce 65 billion downloads/views by 2010.