Seagate announced today that it was the first hard drive maker to ship 1 billion hard drives. Seagate says that the 1 billion drives shipped amounts to about 79 million terabytes of storage. That is enough space for 158 billion hours of digital video.

You could also store a whopping 1.2 trillion hours of music. Seagate says that it took 29 years to ship 1 billion drives but that it expects to ship its next billion drives in 5 years. The first hard drive Seagate shipped was the ST506 with 5 megabytes of storage for $1500 in 1979.

"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. 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."

Via Seagate