When a company sells 2 billion of anything, there’s bound to be a good amount of competition that arises along the way. Unfortunately, with that much competition comes a fair number of casualties.
A few weeks ago we posted on the OWC Blog that hard drive manufacturer Seagate Technology recently shipped its 2 billionth hard disk drive. And now the folks at StorageNewsletter have posted a little historical snapshot of those who have challenged Seagate and the two other current HDD manufacturers – Toshiba and Western Digital – along the way.
Grimly dubbed the “HDD Graveyard”, StorageNewsletter lists all of those companies that have failed or discontinued production on HDDs since the technology’s introduction by IBM in 1956. Of the 220 companies that have entered production since that year, only the three mentioned above have survived. That leaves 217 that have failed or discontinued production. This list is worth checking out not only because it unearths some very notable names, but it also brings to light some interesting trivia from the history of the HDD.
Of course, the advent of Solid State Drives has played a big part in eliminating some of the need for HDDs, but it’s interesting to see the journey of their platter-based brethren. So take a stroll back in time and check out just how far the HDD has come.
As you may recall, Apple 
The Mayans may have been wrong… We’ve got massive flooding in Thailand causing a world-wide hard drive shortage, asteroids are on the way, Internet Explorer is no longer on top of the web browser food-chain, dinosaurs will soon be roaming the earth while the Mac Pro goes extinct, people are talking to their phones now, the Mac platform is becoming more susceptible to viruses, there are dogs and cats, living together – it’s mass hysteria! Is November 2011 the end of what we know?
