Seagate Technology

Seagate Technology Holdings plc has spent over four decades building the world's digital backbone. Founded in 1978 as Shugart Technology by Alan Shugart and Finis Conner, the company shipped its first drive, the ST-506, in 1980. That 5.25-inch hard disk drive, with a then-roomy 5 megabytes, caught the eye of IBM, which chose it for the IBM XT in 1983. The decision helped ignite the microcomputer boom and put Seagate on the map.

Since then, Seagate has grown through a series of strategic moves. It absorbed Control Data's Imprimis division in 1989, Conner Peripherals in 1996, Maxtor in 2006, and Samsung's HDD business in 2011. Today, the company is incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Fremont, California. It employs tens of thousands of people worldwide and has delivered more than four and a half billion terabytes of storage capacity over its history.

Seagate's product line spans hard disk drives and solid-state drives for personal computers, enterprise data centers, and everything in between. The company's big bet is on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), a technology that uses a laser to write data at higher densities. HAMR is already shipping in volume and has enabled drives with capacities that seemed impossible a decade ago. The company plans to launch 50TB HAMR drives in 2027, a move that could reshape the economics of mass storage. [edit]