Seagate Technology

Seagate Technology PLC [Public Limited Company] (commonly referred to as Seagate) is an American data storage company. Since 2010, the company is incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Fremont, California, United States.

Seagate developed the first 5.25-inch hard disk drive (HDD), the 5-megabyte ST-506, in 1980. They were a major supplier in the microcomputer market during the 1980s, especially after the introduction of the IBM XT in 1983. Today Seagate, along with its competitor Western Digital, dominates the HDD market. Much of their growth has come through their acquisition of competitors. In 1989, Seagate acquired Control Data Corporation's Imprimis division, the makers of CDC's HDD products. Seagate acquired Conner Peripherals in 1996, Maxtor in 2006 and Samsung's HDD business in 2011.

By 1983, the company shipped over 200,000 units for revenues of $110 million. 平均$550一块，好买卖。 In 1989, Seagate acquired Control Data's (CDC) Imprimis Technology, CDC's disk storage division, resulting in a combined market share of 43 percent. In 1991, Seagate introduced the Barracuda HDD, the industry's first hard disk with a 7200-RPM spindle speed. In May 1993, Seagate became the first company to cumulatively ship 50 million HDDs over its firm's history. (50*million - 200,000) / 200,000 = 249倍。2009年买入腾讯控股到2020年卖出大约是168倍。In 1996, Seagate merged with Conner Peripherals to form the world's largest independent hard-drive manufacturer.

In 1996, Seagate introduced the industry's first hard disk with a 10,000-RPM spindle speed, the Cheetah 4LP. The product increased to a speed of 15,000-RPM by 2000 with the release of the Cheetah 15X. In May 1997, the High Court of Justice in England awarded Amstrad PLC $93 million in a lawsuit over reportedly faulty disk drives Seagate sold to Amstrad, a British manufacturer and marketer of personal computers. That year Seagate also introduced the first Fibre Channel interface hard drive.

Between 1997 and 2004, Seagate reduced its headcount from approximately 111,000 to approximately 50,000, rationalized its factory footprint from 24 factories to 11 factories and reduced design centers form seven to three. During this period, Seagate's output increased from approximately 9 million drives per quarter to approximately 20 million drives per quarter.

In 1998, the company's Seagate Research facility was also established in Pittsburgh, a $30 million investment that focused on future technologies and prototypes. Technology developed by the center would include devices like the hard drive disk for Microsoft's first Xbox.

In 1999, Seagate shipped its 250 millionth hard drive. 1993年是50m. (250-50)/50=4倍。

In 2003, Seagate re-entered the HDD market for notebook computers and provided the 1-inch disk hard drives for the first iPods. The following year, The New York Times called Seagate "the nation's top maker of hard drives used to store data in computers".

In 2007, Seagate created the hybrid drive concept. In April 2008, Seagate was the first to ship 1 billion HDDs. According to CNet, it took 17 years to ship the first 100 million and 15 years to ship the next 900 million. 1999年是2.5亿，(10-2.5)/2.5=3倍。

In January 2009, the company's market value was less than $1.5 billion. In June 2010, Seagate released the world's first 3 TB hard drive. In September Seagate released the first portable 1.5 TB hard drive. In July 2011, the company changed its country of incorporation from the Cayman Islands to Ireland. In December 2011, Seagate acquired Samsung's HDD business.

In 2012, its market value had increased to over $14 billion. In March Seagate demonstrated the first 1 TB/square inch density hard drive, with the possibility of scaling up to 60 TB by 2030. the 5-megabyte ST-506, in 1980. 60T/5M=1200万倍。1200万元/80/365=410.96元。

In 2013, Seagate was the first HDD company to begin shipment of shingled [叠瓦] magnetic recording drives, announcing in September that they had already shipped over 1 million such drives. In February 2016, Seagate was hit with class action lawsuit over the defective hard drives they sold. In August 2016, Seagate demonstrated its 60 TB SSD, claimed to be "the largest SSD ever demonstrated".

In January 2017, Seagate announced the shutdown at Suzhou, China - one of its largest HDD assembly plants.

In 2015, one of Seagate's wireless storage devices was found to have an undocumented hardcoded password.

Controversies

On January 21, 2014, numerous tech articles around the globe published findings from the cloud storage provider Backblaze that Seagate hard disks are least reliable among prominent hard disk manufacturers. However, the Backblaze tests have been criticized for having a flawed methodology that has inconsistent environment variables, such as ambient temperatures and vibration, and disk usage; in addition, Backblaze's statistics show that the vast majority of installed drives at Backblaze are Seagate, and Backblaze editor Andy Klein has noted "that a large number of new Seagate drives being deployed could be statistically responsible" for failure rate data in their specific datacenter population. In the broader landscape, Seagate enterprise drives have been named most reliable for seven years running in the well-respected IT Brand Pulse survey of top IT professionals, and have been cited as leader the last two years running in every measured category: reliability, performance, innovation, price, and service and support. Backblaze has released an updated page of statistics which shows that Seagate drives had by far the most failures in Q2 2019. Best by far were Toshiba.

In Feburary 2022, the company's market value  is 22.58 billion USD. In 2012, its market value had increased to over $14 billion. 22.58/14=1.613.

六级/考研单词: data, headquarters, unite, digit, dominate, million, cumulative, tentative, merge, manufacture, sue, compute, fibre, footprint, invest, prototype, hybrid, billion, accord, march, assemble, password, controversy, globe, prominent, invariable, usage, install, edit, deploy, brand, pulse, cite, innovate, update