Seagate has issued a press release announcing that company has shipped 2 billion hard disk drives. It took the company 29 years to sell the first billion of their HDDs. The second billion was achieved in the last four years.
The company states that the last billion was achieved so quickly because the demand has been fueled by the explosive growth of cloud infrastructures, social media and business applications. Also a wide variety of of consumer devices that contain HDDs such as NAS units, set-top boxes and consoles have contributed to the rapid growth.
A fact that Seagate doesn't mention in it's press release is that there are currently only three independent HDD manufacturers. In the last two decades about 200 companies have been manufacturing hard disk drives but now only Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba are left.
It's expected that the demand for storage will grow due to user generated HD videos and pictures. Researchers estimate that the demand might quadruple from 2013-2015. They also report that that consumers who currently use up 1 TB of of data a month, could use up to 20 TB of data by 2015.
While we might all agree that there is a continuous growing demand of data storage capacity, the question will be how much of the data will be stored on HDDs and how much on new storage devices like SSDs.
