Seagate Shipped 3ZB of Storage on HDDs

By John Paulsen, ‘Data for Good’ advocate, Seagate Technology plc

What does 3ZB mean in the real world?
Seagate Technology plc just became the first data storage company to have shipped 3ZB of hard drive storage capacity, surpassing that milestone in March 2021.

It had previously taken Seagate 36 years to reach the milestone of its first 1ZB shipped in total. Then it took less than another 4 years to reach a total of 2ZB shipped, and then just over 2 more years to accomplish 3ZB shipped since the company’s founding. Firm’s ability to manufacture ever more storage capacity has accelerated.

3ZB is a big number. It represents a lot of data stored. It is enough space to hold 30 billion 4K movies – that’s so much cinema it’d take 5.4 million years to watch it, or 60 billion video games – enough to let you enjoy nonstop gameplay for 86,700 lifetimes.

But when we think about the future, since the demand for storage is increasing so rapidly, 3ZB is really just a few drops of water to a very thirsty traveler…

Need for storage is accelerating
IDC estimated last year in Seagate’s Rethink Data report that the sum of data generated globally by 2025 is set to accelerate exponentially to 175 ZB – that’s 58x all the storage Seagate has shipped to date. Put another way, more data is created in a single hour now than in an entire year just 2 decades ago.

Did you know a self-driving car can produce up to 32TB of data in a single day, per vehicle? And a smart city can generate 2.5PB of data each day.

But at the same time, IDC found that, on average, only 32% of data available to enterprises is being put to work, while the remaining 68% goes unleveraged. That’s a lot of potential value lost.

So it’s critical that storage devices and infrastructure keep up with the growth of data creation. Thankfully, Seagate is leading with innovations like HAMR which will help continue to increase the capacities of HDDs and enterprise storage systems long into the future.

Meanwhile, to capture the full potential of data at the zettabyte scale – to enable innovations that change the way we live, heal, work, commute, and take care of our planet – there also needs to be a simple, secure, and economic way to capture, store, and activate data. So Seagate’s also innovating with its open standards-based storage systems and software and Lyve edge-to-cloud mass storage platform, including the new Lyve Rack, Lyve Mobile and Lyve Cloud to help enterprises overcome the cost and complexity of storing, moving, and activating data at scale.

All this data has value
Data is a treasure trove of value. To the organizations who are investing the effort into creating, capturing, analyzing, and storing data in various repositories, the more they can leverage their investment by putting that data to use, the more discoveries they can make, the more problems they can solve, and the more value they will derive from it.

In celebration of Seagate’s milestone – 3ZB shipped – the infographic below offers some other real-world examples of just how much data is being generated today.Take a look: