Seagate Technology, the world’s second largest maker of hard disk drives, on Wednesday said that this quarter it would celebrate a major milestone in its history: shipment of its second billionth hard drive.

Seagate celebrated shipment of 1.5 billionth HDD in October, 2010, whereas the one billionth hard disk drive milestone was reached in April, 2008. As it appears, it took Seagate, which was founded in 1979, around 28 years to supply one billion of hard drives, but only about 4.5 years to ship another billion of HDD units. The demand for storage solutions continues to grow rapidly despite of the economic weakness around the globe.

One of the key manufacturing facilities that made possible to ship a billion of hard drives in four and a half years is Seagate’s China operations established back in 1995. This quarter the total amount of hard disk drives produced by Seagate in China exceeded one billion of units.

“I want to thank all past and present Seagate employees, as well as local and central government officials in China, as we just celebrated the production of our 1 billionth drive from our China operations. We accomplished this remarkable feat in just 17 years, and we expect that the company will ship its 2 billionth disk drive this quarter. Congratulations to all involved,” said Steven Luczo, chief executive officer and chairman of Seagate, during the company’s conference call with financial analysts.

Seagate Technology on Wednesday reported financial results for the quarter ended September 28, 2012. During the first quarter, on a GAAP basis the company reported revenue of approximately $3.7 billion, gross margin of 28.4%, net income of $582 million and diluted earnings per share of $1.42. Seagate shipped around 58 million hard disk drives during the quarter. Average HDD capacity was 738GB.

Tags: Seagate, HDD, Business