[Editor’s note: This blog first appeared in an LSI blog before Seagate acquired the SandForce product group from them.]
Congratulations to Seagate on achieving this monumental milestone of shipping 2 billion hard disk drives (HDDs)! To put this in perspective, if you measured the Earths circumference in inches, it is only about 1.57 billion.
Those HDDs have used a lot of parts and intellectual property (IP), and LSI has been a very happy, long-time partner to Seagate providing read channel IP for nearly all of the 2 billion HDDs it has shipped. The read channel is a critical piece of technology inside the HDD that translates the magnetically encoded information on the rotating media to electronic signals that can be understood by the host computer. Advances in the LSI read channel IP over the years have also contributed to the continuing HDD capacity increases we depend upon today.
Seagate reported it took 29 years to ship its first billion drives and only 4 years for the second. This jaw-dropping growth is a stark reminder that the global data deluge continues to swell. Now more than ever, IT architects and managers need smarter ways — down to the silicon — to produce new storage and networking efficiencies and reduce costs.
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