"Well the first drives stored around 5 megabytes and they weighed about five pounds. So you're talking a very big device with not a lot of storage. A lot different than today's devices."
The price was heavy too…about 15 hundred dollars.
"And if you compare that to where we are today, you can pick up a terabyte product, 200 thousand times the capacity, for less than a third of what you paid for those original 5 megabyte drives."
The market for hard drives….is growing…and Seagate says while it took it thirty years to sell the first billion….it will sell the second billion within five years….
"Today our products are going into a lot of different things outside traditional uses. TVs, digital video recorders, MP3 players, video game consoles, GPSs. Even automobiles. You look at the number of advertisements that I've seen recently for people actually highlighting the fact that they have hard drives in their cars."
Home servers and high definition digital video recorders, will mean storage needs will continue to grow…even as traditional hard drive technology faces new competition from flash memory based solid state drives. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.