History (1997): Seagate Ships Its 100 Millionth HDD, 2.5GB 3.5-inch Medalist

Seagate Technology announced it has shipped over 100,000,000 HDDss to OEMs, distributors, systems integrators and end users worldwide over the past 17 years.

To commemorate the milestone, Ron Verdoorn, executive VP and COO of the storage products group, presented the company’s 100 millionth drive to the Tech Museum of Innovation (San Jose, CA), a 2.5GB, 3.5-inch Medalist.

On that occasion, Seagate compared its up-to-date technology drive specs with those of its legendary 5MB full-height 5.25-inch ST-506. Certainly things have improved, with one important exception: the average latency, which has only been halved in 17 years.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 108, published on January 1997.