[martinald]

That seems hard to believe. That would be five billion 1TB hard drives.

Considering around 100 million hard drives are shipped per quarter, that would be over a decade of production.

[bduerst]

For platter or SSD drives, sure. Some forms of magnetic tape storage can get up to 300 TB per cartridge though, which can scale up to petabytes in the right config.

Still ridiculous for information that is worth less and less over time.

[martinald]

300TB per cartridge in 2013? I think 10TB per cartridge was pretty high round then. That's still around half a billion tape cartridges, which are also very slow to read and write from.

[6nf]

There's rumours that the 2011 HDD shortage was actually due to the NSA buying it all.

[samb1729]

Do you have a source for that 100 million figure? It strikes me as awfully low considering how many personal computers must surely exist in the world and how often they'd be replaced without reusing the drives, not even factoring in servers.

[martinald]

Sorry, that's per quarter. So it would be more like over a decade of all worldwide HDD production. Still crazy high IMO.