Posted by Hustle > 2013-03-20 14:34 | Report Abuse

KUALA LUMPUR: Seagate Technology shipped two billion hard disk drives (HDD), driven by the surge in demand from mobile applications, cloud infrastructures, social media, business applications and consumer markets. The storage solutions company said on Wednesday it was the first HDD manufacturer to reach the record due to the digital world. Seagate said it took 29 years to reach one billion units shipped and just four years to reach the second billion milestone. "Digital content demand continues to stem from a wide range of sources, including social media and mobile devices, fueling the need for storage," it said. Analysts estimated over four billion hours of user-generated content were watched each month on YouTube alone. User generated high-definition camcorder video, still pictures, and smartphone clip sharing storage needs were expected to quadruple from 2013 to 2015. IDC's research vice president, for hard drives and semiconductors, John Rydning, said the ever-growing number of mobile and content capture devices using cloud services was fuelling the growth of digital content. "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% 2012-2016 compound annual growth rate," he said.