If you need proof that demand for data storage is accelerating, look no further than Seagate, which has become the first company to ship 3 zettabytes of hard drive storage capacity.
The rate at which the company went from shipping one zettabyte to the next is quite simply staggering. It took Seagate 36 years to ship its first zettabyte of capacity, which happened in March 2015. Four years later and the next zettabyte had shipped, and then last month, just two years later, the 3 zettabyte mark was reached.
Of course, the next question everyone will be asking is: how big is a zettabyte?
As Seagate explains, a zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes, and one exabyte is 1,000 petabytes. Each petabyte is 1,000 terabytes. A zettabyte is enough storage for 30 billion 4K movies, or 60 billion video games, or 7.5 trillion MP3 songs according to Seagate. If you wanted 3 zettabytes of storage at home, you'd need to hook up 300 million 10TB hard drives.
Our need for more storage is apparently only going to increase, with current estimates predicting the world will produce 175 zettabytes of data a year by 2025. Self-driving cars alone will account for 32 terabytes per day, which of course is music to the ears of a storage company like Seagate, assuming it can keep up with demand while also increasing the size of the drives it ships.
The good news is, Seagate expects to be shipping 50TB hard drives by 2026, and Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology should scale up to 80TB. And for longer term storage, Microsoft is working on a brand new storage medium constructed from quartz glass that has already made it possible to watch the Superman movie for thousands of years.