Slashdot Mirror
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.
Especially if they have some inside knowledge on a technology that will wipe out the hard drive market in 10-15 years...
:)
Cash now, AND cash later
All conjecture, of course... but isn't that what Big Blue is about these days? Research, research and more research?
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.
The IBM Death Star has been defeated! The rebellion has won! :D
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
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...
I'm guessing Hitachi's going to find in a few months that they got 18,000 migrant workers and dummies propped up with sticks.
Synergy is your friend
don't forget to park the heads before shutting off the lights.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
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.
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?
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).
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...
but isn't that what Big Blue is about these days? Research, research and more research?
Not really. IBM is all about services, services, and more services these days. Why fight for a piece of a razor-thin margin on hardware when consulting services are still practically name-your-own-price?
Intelligent Life on Earth
-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..
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?
oops...sorry about that
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
The 60GXP and 120GXP drives are excellent. Most of the problems that people had were from the 75GXP (older than the 60GXP) drives. Even then, the rumors of problems with 75GXPs were a little over-inflated. I don't believe that there were any problems that were more significant than anyone elses. In my opinion, there were just too many l337 h4X0r5 that were accidently killing their drives and bitching about factory defects.
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.]
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?
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
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.
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!!
EMC and IBM have been in competition for a long time. They've been buying drives from their next door neighbor, Maxtor/Quantum, for quite a while now.
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.
Don't you mean
:/
C:\>shipdisk
Back in the day, before the internet supported graphics and we had to dial in to the university's VAX 11/785 to read USENET with -- get this -- *KERMIT*, I actually renamed "park.com" to "logout.com" just so I could *pretend* I had a real network.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
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.