Seagate
More info
- Creator
- Al Shugart, Finis Conner et al.
- Released
- 1979
- Type
- Hard drive manufacturer
The drive maker that shrank the hard disk to PC size in 1980 and, forty years on, is still arguing that spinning platters are worth buying.
Al Shugart, whose name was already on Shugart Associates' floppy drives, founded the company in 1979 as Shugart Technology, with Finis Conner among the co-founders. It soon became Seagate. The following year brought the ST-506, a 5 MB 5¼-inch drive whose ST-506 interface became the standard for early PC disks. When the IBM PC/XT shipped with a hard drive in 1983, Seagate rode along.
The industry then consolidated through acquisitions, and Seagate swallowed several: Conner Peripherals in 1996, Maxtor in 2006 and Samsung's hard drive unit in 2011. Only three hard drive makers are left, with Seagate and Western Digital the two big ones. Seagate's answer to the SSD is sheer capacity, with HAMR pushing drives to 30 TB and beyond.