Storage specialist Seagate has just announced that it is the first hard-disk drive manufacturer to have shipped 1 billion HDD units. The huge number makes a statement about Seagate's position on the storage market, but it also draws attention to the amount of information stored by computer users.

According to the company, the billion drives shipped have a joint storage capacity of approximately 79 million terabytes. This means that all these drives are able to store about 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of music.

Founded in 1979, Seagate was at first offering its 5-Megabyte ST506 units that sold for an impressive $1,500. This means that every megabyte of data cost no less than $300. Now, multiply the figure by the number of megabytes your HDD is offering, and enjoy the results. Nowadays, a terabyte-sized HDD can record 32 days of HD video, and comes with a price tag of $0.00022 per megabyte.

"This company has an amazing, colorful and important history, which continues to be written every day by our 55,000 employees around the world," said Bill Watkins, Seagate CEO.

"Al Shugart and a few others started the company behind a convenience store in 1979 and enabled the birth of the first PCs. Today we're at the center of the digital content revolution," claimed Wilson. "So reaching this milestone is a great opportunity for us to reflect on our accomplishments and those of our predecessors, and to also look forward to the great things we can still achieve as a company," he continued.

Digital content is continuously being produced and downloaded to long-term storage devices. According to market analysts, there are over one billion digital dedicated and phone cameras in the world, and users are estimated to have taken more than 250 billion snapshots until now.

"Digital content proliferation is a long-term phenomenon," according to John Rydning, IDC's Research Director for hard drives. "This phenomenon is pushing demand for hard drives to more than 600 million units per year by 2010 and will continue to fuel hard drive demand in the decade ahead."