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IBM Spins Down
beggs writes "IBM and Hitachi have signed an agreement which will take IBM out of the hard drive market in three years. This press release on IBM's web site gives some details of the deal. 18,000 IBM employees and all their hard drive related patents will join about 6,000 Hitachi employees to form a new company that will be a subsidiary of Hitachi. Sad to see big blue out of the hard drive business, they have made a lot of contributions to computing." We did a story when they announced their plans back in April.
$2.5 billion to get out of the hard drive market sounds like a good business deal for IBM to me.
What will stop Hitachi from firing everyone after three years and moving production to cheaper Asia?
I am still not sure whether globalization is a good thing or not.
Maybe IBM finally brought some of this vapor-ware storage technology to production and they are just selling their drive business for what it is worth today rather than let it die when the new technology is introduced. IBM has always been at the bleeding edge of research so maybe they have something up their sleeve?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
i own a 60gxp ibm brand hard drive that i bought new in november... since november i have used it as a test drive, formatting and re-formatting it with many different types of file systems for a variety of linux, bsd, and even win2k. my 60gxp is a 20gig model and i have yet to have any trouble with the drive, in spite of the fact that i am constantly downloading and writing to it. i have read many negative reports on the 40gig and higher capacity 60gxp and 75gxp models, but i have yet to encounter a problem with my 20gig. i have heard very little with regards to failure of the 20gig gxps.
How long do you people think it will be before harddrives are replaced by newwer forms of datastorage?
As long as Hitachi still puts cash into R&D then we should still see cool technology come out of this new company.
It will still have all same IBM employees -- the same people who came up with the cool technology in the first place.
There is a certain irony in the way in which the huge boom - founded on the idea that computing was to become so cheap to use that it would transform all aspects of the economy - should result in the bust that will reduce competition and so make computing more expensive.
We all know the dangers of monopolies and how innovators can rapidly turn into blocks on progress, so we'll have to watch with care.
The IBM Death Star has been defeated! The rebellion has won! :D
Oh I have a 30 gig 75GXP that's worked great for a while now.
/. at 6 AM.
I was trying to be funny. Oh well. Failed miserably, I suppose. That's what I get for posting to
Their strength is their institutional consulting contracts... but that's hardly a growth path as the IBM name slowly, over time, becomes known for nothing in particular.
This was always their strength. It was almost like they made computers to support their consulting initiative.
Don't ever count this out - large corporations will always want this kind of service. It gives them the warm fuzzys to know there is some place to point a finger.
IBM does not want to compete on hardware. It wants to become a services company. Getting rid of hardware is a good step on the way to becoming really profitable again.
My blog
that was wrong in so many ways. IBM has been the number one contributor to hard disk technology since they have came into existance. They bought us more reliable, faster and higher throughput drives consistantly. So maybe a few drives fell through the qa process, big deal. I can gaurentee that there is a higher percent of failed seagate, western digital and maxtor drives. Thanks IBM, for all the great new dazzly stuff you bought me!
Later,
Phil
well, i am not sure about this, but i believe Sun's 2 major hdd suppliers were Seagate and IBM .. they had 2 suppliers since at a certain time, Seagate alone could not provide them with the requested amounts ..
...
well now, since IBM's are owned by Hitachi, Sun does no longer have to buy their disks from a competitor.. they buy them from from a partner !
good news indeed
I think that the new spin off will do good however. I am curious though... and this is because I see this with my own eyes and hear through friends (it happens all the time and is increasing). When IBM started to shut down, did they let people go that were good quality workers that now must in essence reapply to the new spin off? Where there a bunch of decision makers that caused the problems (or just made them worse) that never found their job in danger? In other words, did the cancer just get moved into a new body? I sincerely hope not, for the workers and of course for myself as I would like inexpensive quality drives.
The harddrive market is not really a lucrative bussness anymore. The costs of developping harddrives with larger capacity is almost outgrowing the earnings of selling drives.
IBM has a good reasearch facility which have come up with new methods for storing data. Probably they want to raise money for the production of some of those methods. It's not that that division was skyrocketing their sales revenue anyway...
This event reminds me of a time when the IBM AT was the hot sh*t and IBM was going around touting their wares.
At a demo, the IBM sales rep asked for questions. My friend said "How fast is your drive?" This was at a time when 60ms access time was SOTA. The IBM rep said "80ms..." My friend retorts "But the current tech is 60ms" to which the IBM rep said "See? IBM's is faster".
Doh.
Glad to see IBM's HDD go...
don't forget to park the heads before shutting off the lights.
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Umm. IBM has a PATENT division/business, in and of itself. All that arm does is collect royalties, and sign licensing deals.
That alone should be enough to keep IBM in business for decades.
Also note: Certain IBM HDD operations are not included in the deal.
I would suspect this is the research area that is working on the next-generation HDD stuff. I don't think IBM would transfer any existing patents it hasn't already milked all the royalties out of.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Sad to see big blue out of the hard drive business, they have made a lot of contributions to computing. Yeah, it's really sad. I'll espacially miss the 75gxp series.
Maybe lifetime there's a higher percentage in favor of IBM, but you hear stories about people going through three, maybe 4 drives under warranty. IBM didn't do what people felt they should to remedy the situation, and their reputation suffered. Tell me that today you would rather buy a 60GB GXP than a comparable Maxtor drive.
Synergy is your friend
So does this mean that IBM will also stop doing R&D for new drives and storage techniques such as the stuff they are doing at Almaden?
EMC is in fierce competition with Hitachi in the enterprise market. EMC used to buy it's drives, the base units anyway, from IBM. Wonder how EMC will do having to buy its drives from its biggest competitor?
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi
Most likely IBM has already technology that will obsolete hard disks. What would be a better way to get rid of expensive manufactory lines than selling them before they get obsolete?
IBM has always been tops on the Research and Development in the field of Computer Science. It is not too bad that they are leaving the hard drive market, but actually good that they are doing this. The Hard drives have turned into a commodity. People are making them cheaper and cheaper. At some point, there will so cheap that 1) there will be very little profit margin 2) only a handful of companies will be able to profit.
I'd rather see IBM dump this branch and be able to earn royalty or have stock ownership in this new company than bog down their budget with this sector. By dumping this sector, they can now effectively use their R&D to develop something new. Maybe a new hdd technology, that they will license to the new company.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
IBM still does a lot of semiconductor fabrication research and licenses the patents out. I would guess this will happen to hard drive technology.
Making chips and hard drives is basically a commodity business. The real money is in developing new methods, products, etc. that can be licensed. IBM is very good at this.
"Sad to see big blue out of the hard drive business..."
IBM drives used to be good. They were expensive, but they were good. You knew that if you sprung the extra cash for an IBM drive you were paying for reliability.
Exactly when this changed I don't know, but what I do know is when I hear of people who have had a large capacity drive die suddenly overnight, my first reply is 'is it an IBM?' - literally every case within the last year has been 'yes - how did you know?'
I (and many others) are presently involved with a class action lawsuit against IBM for claiming that their drives are reliable when they are not. I unfortunately bought an IBM Deskstar 75GXP drive when looking for a solid reliable drive however this turned out to be a big mistake. It was the first IBM drive to use a glass platter to reduce costs etc. but unfortunately it simply made the thing extremely unreliable. My own tests have shown that the thing is VERY susceptible to overheating, and the only way I could get it to retain any data was to keep it as cool as I can (at this point using seperate screw on dual fan HDD cooler and extra case ventilation with nothing near the drive).
Bye IBM - you wont be missed (like my 50Gb of data was).
You have got to be kidding. They have seen the light. Take a look at IBM Global Services. That is where the $$$ is, and that was a major reason for the Compaq buyout by HP.
They give financial bonuses to anyone in the company who files a patent... they run a great public, free patent search database... and they defend and license them with vigor. I am curious whether they will still do hard disk drive R&D, or just mass storage R&D. Given all that IBM has cooking in its labs, it could be that they want out of hard drives because "the end is nigh" for that mode of storage. I'd look at storage innovations and patents filed by IBM in the last 5 years or so to see whether this is actually the case...
-5 ignorant.
"with the speed that our economy is changing, we won't even notice the flux of 24,000 jobs"
24000 people would beg to differ, I'm sure
"We're more well known for our R&D efforts contributing to the latest in technology."
"We're" best known for our tremendous wealth gap, and our lovable platitude-spouting morons who insist that 24000 people losing their jobs is a good thing, and that those who lose their jobs will "get over it" and "move on" to something better.
Your ignorant, ignominious, Limbaugh-looney bleatings betray the fact that your concept of "human capital" lacks any trace of humanity. Nice flamebait, though.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
What exactly have you been missing with regards to drivers for your hard disks? Hardly the area where drivers are needed..
Thanks Big Blue!
Brought to you by the we-didn't-like-benefits-anyway-department
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
What does this mean for their newer micro drives they have been developing? I was really looking forward to seeing these in my Gamecube, but Nintendo isn't know for making new agreements with new companies all to fast. Will they have to make an agreement with Hitachi to use them?
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Sector and read failures are an integral part of the ATA standard and are passed via the HD controller as responses to failures. People have NO RIGHT to complain about these failures in 75gxp, the linux kernel and fs subsystems are even designed to handle these errors gracefully and not panic. Do you complain when Java <throws> an exception? No, you put some code in the catch(e){}; Instead of complaining, do something about it, ext2 and ext3 should be adjusted so that you can use,
ext2 make install --unreliableHD-12
where the use of this switch whilst compiling ext2 will automatically incorporate RAID5-on-a-drive-Reed-Solomon-type ECC in the fs module with an ability to handle a 12percent probability of sector failure per year. The fs source code will decide the Shannon's minimum ECC distance on this information and inline the appropriate strength of ECC to absorb these failures, these extra ECC blocks will be stored on different tracks because HDs have a distinct lack of spatial ECC making them vulnerable to head-scratch and cylinder-not-found errors(?).
So there, we can all use 75gxp now, if the drive's own IDE ECC can't handle read errors, then instead escalate and use the added ECC in the ext2fs subssytem or in the kernel to perform ECC. That way the paranoid among us can hedge their bets against read failures and sector not found failures. Obviously global drive malfunctions such as total drive electronics failure or total bearing failure won't be protected against. Heck WinRAR compression has this ECC feature built in, why can't a fs which is far more critical have it built in? Quit whining.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
C:\>shipdisk
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
oops...sorry about that
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
....I have had three IBM drives go belly up on me.
Three! The only other drive to go bad (on me) was a Western Digital... and I think that was a fluke.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I have 3 40GB 60GXP drives. They have been running very nicely for nearly a year now. No problems here. I actually plan to buy a 4th drive too.
It seems that most of the problems were with the 75GXP drives, and even then, the problems were overinflated by Internet rumors. Things just die over time. Especially mechanical devices.
My 60GXPs are faster than my buddy's Maxtor ATA133 drives.
I love them, but it is just a matter of preference. So yes, I would take the 60 GXP drives. The benchmarks give me the performance in the areas that I want them. And for everday use, they have been very reliable.
If people go through 3 or 4 drives, then they are probably damaging them in some way. IBM has tools to check the drives properly. If you screw up your data, they can be unrecoverable to an OS like Windows (any drive can have this problem). I foobared my drives by trying to push my machine too hard. The data got corrupted and made my RAID array puke. The IBM tool fixed the problem.
I am willing to bet that 90% of these problems are related to operator issues, especially since a lot of the overclockers were buying IBM for a while, and this is where the news of the problems began to surface.
They make great drives, and I will kepp buying them until the end.
IBM is just redifining itself.
They sold the comunications side of the business to Cisco a couple of years ago.
They sell the HDD to Hitachi.
Looks like they want to focus on services and Big Iron. Stuff they do very well.
Technology is only a vehicle. People are the ones that drive it.
I suppose this shouldn't be a huge surprise. Being an ex-IBMer, I can empathsize with the employees in the HDD division, I'm sure from their point of view, it sucks rocks. I used to be in the service division, back when they cut service off like a gangreen limb and started calling us Technology Service Solutions (TSS) as part of a Joint Venture with Kodak.
I suppose the point of my story is that even several years ago, IBM has been looking for the places it can cut the fat, increase the profits. It's what all business folk do. And IBM has done their share of silly business moves that looked like good ideas, (*cough* TSS *cough*). And if it's doesn't work out, those who endure, will get folded back in and things could very well be better than before.
IBM does alot of drive business. How many times have you opened up your Apple G3 or G4, only to find the IBM HDD inside? Or how about your laptop? How many folks have upgraded their laptop HDD's with IBM drives? If IBM is getting out of the HDD business, there must be something in R&D that's pretty darn cool, or IBM's losing their competative edge.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
does anyone think like me that a new technology is coming?
ibm sells their hdd business, but according to their
past they really have enough money to keep trying...
is there something that is much better than any hdd, so that ibm doesn't need hdd business anymore...
do you think so?
A year ago we purchased four 36GB 10K RPM SSA drives. These are the high end drives that cost $4000 a piece. In the course of 13 months, three of these four drives have FAILED. A 75% failure rate seems a little high for such expensive drives. Don't think I would by IBM ever again.
I remember Steve Gibson complaining that Spinrite couldn't do it's job properly when drives started lying and doing internal sector translation, ECC, non-overrideable write-back cache (*extremely* dangerous for databases when HD ignores fsync() ), maybe it'll be good for all the high-level drive electronics functions to move back into software so that we can take back control of our data.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
IBM have a huge research in this field. May be they realized that they almost (in 5-10 years) reached Da Limit?
Or , to throw another conspiracy theory. They found some other chip way to produce massive storage volumes (like optics, I dunno, or something "completely different")?
Ironically, it was the Free Unixes that were first to take advantage of the Command Tagged Queueing on the Deskstars. In fact that was one of their major selling points (until the whole quality control fiasco hit). To this day I don't think any other manufacturer has CTQ support on any ATA drive.
I read the internet for the articles.
Basically, what IBM is saying is that the market for storage based on mechanical devices will be gone in the not so distant future. Expect IBM to be a major player in one if not all of these disruptive technologies:
1. Solid State non-volatile memory
2. Bio-electro non-volatile memory
3. Nano-MEMs based non-volatile memory
All this is good, and just a sign that the guys up top at Big Blue know when to get out of what should have been the first thing to be replaced in PC's.......a moving mechanism and primary point of failure in computers.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
I'm suprised that nobody saw this coming sooner. On a recent shipment of IBM PCs (before the announcement), I noticed that all of their hard drives were made by Maxtor.
I certainly hope that this closure does not effect IBM's R&D on some of their next-gen storage devices (extremely-high-density hard disks, holographic storage, microdrive, etc). Those devices showed promise, and IBM is probably the only company capable of continuing such efforts (Their efforts could have equaled those of PARC)
So long, and thanks for the disk!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
A nifty possibility is that the crystal could be removeable. Storing gigabytes on a sugar cube sized crystal with no moving parts reminds me of the Anne McCaffrey novel PartnerShip, which also features a villain who runs a galactic monopoly with a remarkable resemblance to Microsoft.
Hard drives are slow. I want my files, except music and porn, to be stored in some kind of non-volatile RAM.
The shareholder is always right.
Well, Maxtor purchased Quantum, and the amount of designed-in suck in their drives has lessened since then. :) (I'm a Seagate man these days though, after some wonderful experiences with 75GXP's >:( )
and I'm using an ECS board that has been totally issue free.. (note however, that I don't open endedly recommend ECS motherboards in general, I'm still VERY wary of the models I don't have extensive experience with.)
Abit always sucked for manufacturing, they DESIGN fantastic boards, but the reliability has always been somewhat sketchy. bah.
I'd buy a stone tablet and a chisel before I'd buy another Maxtor. I've had way too many of them go bad (three 5.1GB drives in five months a few years back, an 80-gigger more recently, and one or two more in between). By comparison, my 45GB 75GXP, two 60GB 60GXPs, and two 60GB 120GXPs have performed flawlessly.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Aaaaaaaargh! Not one of those. I thought 3 retries was too many. Makes quad-burst ECC sound like some trashy buzzword.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
I am serious. The last 3 IBM HD's that found thier way to me died within weeks. I dont know what they changed.. but.
Long live Fujitsu drives.. my favorite!
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
So one day I was reading about how the 75GXPs fail, and thinking "gee, glad mine is still working," then - honest to god - at that very moment the read arm started banging against the side of the drive! I had to send it away for a month (IBM refused to do an advance RMA) and they sent me back another refurbished 75gxp. I am wary of keeping any important data on it now, needless to say!
Jeremy
I had two, that's right TWO IBM deskstar 60GXP drives fail on me this weekend. They were only 6 months old. Sure they were going 24x7, but that's still a long way from the claimed 100,000 MTBF! Hitachi makes much higher quality drives IMHO.
The only thing that's happened here is a lot of people will be getting their paychecks from a different bank, and will no longer be required to wear a tie to work every day.
The hard drive market is not one so small or static that the loss of one manufacturer will affect the market in a negative way. This is merely a business decision, where IBM feels it can pursue its business goals most effectively by having the division exist as a seperate entity.
I wish all the employees good luck during the inevitable mass firings that will occur during the restructuring (they're not layoffs when you have no plans to recall the affected employees), and good luck inventing, and productizing the next big thing in storage technology. Here's a goal for you: a storage system for an HDTiVo.
Sorry about your luck, but that has to be the funniest thing that I have read all day. :)
I have a Late-2001 iBook (20GB/128mb/600mhz). Its hard drive is an IBM Travelstar 30GN. I was wondering if notebook hard drives are standard or not, so if in a few years I could upgrade it?
I was thinking about putting the 48gb model in this notebook in November when my warranty expires. Is something like this feasable?
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
I have a Maxtor drive, a somewhat older model. I can't get the model number because it's wedged so tightly in my small case that I would literally have to Dremel it out or disassemble the ENTIRE case, including rivets to get at it - imagine the heat buildup in there... It's a 5400RPM 20gb model, late 2000 at least, most likely a 1999 model. It has been dropped, stepped on, kicked, formatted, overheated, dropped while on and transferring data, and squashed while on (as it currently is). It still holds my main system files (XP) and has done so ever since I bought it. SMART hasn't thrown up an error yet, and no bad sectors have come through. I'd buy another one, if I wanted an old, slow, small drive. For now, I'll have to be content with my RAID-0 array of 4x Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80GB 7200RPM drives (ST380021A). mmm... storage
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
It is way more than 5 years ago that I first heard of IBM doing research on holographic storage. At that time they could, I believe, hold somewhere between several hundred GigaBytes of data to several TerraBytes of data in a matrix the size of a sugar cube. What ever happened to that? It seemed to have such great potential, so why isn't it available yet, or even mentioned all that much..?
Admittedly, I haven't scoured the net before posting this, but none of the magazines I subscribe to has mentioned anything about holographic storage in at least 5 years...?
Can anyone explain this to me?
Regards,
Having been on the inside at Hitachi Data Systems for more than a decade through the late 80s and into the mid-90s, I had an "up close and personal" view of the relative advances in HDD technology and R&D. At the time, the advanced research being done at Odawara Works (the home of Hitachi hard disk technology) drew from among the best researchers of almost every division of Hitachi, with the possible exception of the Nuclear Power and Locomotive divisions. In addition, the manufacturing technology employed was considerably more advanced than that of IBM at the time. As a result, MTBF numbers for Hitachi drives were many times those of comparable IBM drives.
Naturally, the dynamics of the business changed when EMC was able to achieve performance and overall system reliability levels that were more than acceptable with integral-cache, RAID-like architectures, able to be built and sold at very economical prices.
As early as 1993/4, many observers predicted that IBM would eventually have to get out of the disk business, as their cost to maintain acceptable reliability and performance would make their product non-competitive. The prediction was that it would be sold to Hitachi, and I've heard that prediction repeated several times in the intervening years. It's also not surprising, nor likely coincidental, that a key executive in the senior stratosphere of Hitachi these days used to be the Chief Engineer in Odawara Works.
Nice move Naruse-san! Omedetou gozaimasu! Ganbatte ne!
I thought AT&T was the death star?
Does no one but me see the real import of this move by IBM. 1) Why would they sell off patents worth millions? 2) What do they have in the pipe that would replace hard drives?
1) Smart technology companies dump technology that is on the way out. IBM is saying here that hard drives are on there way out and will be dissappearing in three years.
2) Solid state storage. In a few years we'll all be using 'flash crystals' or some other 50Gig per portable ounce technology. Hard drives are headed the way of bubble memory, and good riddance. They have been the bottleneck of systems for way to long now.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
In the FreeBSD 4.2 Release notes. Scroll down to the "Tagged Queueing on ATA disks" section.
I read the internet for the articles.