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Seagate buys Maxtor for $1.9B
groovy.ambuj writes "Reuters reports that Seagate Technology would buy rival computer disk-drive maker Maxtor Corp. for $1.9 billion.
Seagate is already world's largest hard drive manufacturer and Maxtor is the third largest after Seagate and Western Digital."
You know, I noticed that between me and my friends the most painful experience when dealing with computers is losing a hard drive.
Yes, I know it's a nerd thing to say but it's almost as bad as losing a pet.
Now, because of the brands of said failed drives, I have developed a quality ranking apart from my friends. And it's the pain of that lost data that backs me up.
I had a death star (IBM deskstar) tear itself apart on me and even though it was one of those old Ukrainian IBM/Hitachi ones, I still shy away from Western Digital who now makes them also. I've also had a Seagate fail me but (to be fair) I had bought it thoroughly used.
Now, when ever I go out and buy a drive, I'm leaning towards Maxtor simply because I have a lot of them and one hasn't failed me with crucial data on it. I'm a lot better prepared to deal with that now as I'm older and wiser so maybe I won't ever feel that level of pain again.
Many of my friends swear by Seagate and also claim they're the quietest thing out there.
These new drives made by the merged company should be quite good, perhaps they're able to combine technologies, patents, manufacturing methods and resources to form a very reliable and quiet drive.
What I'd like to ask slashdot readers is for a good way to measure drive quality other than throwing down chicken bones and looking at them or reading tea leaves?
I guess the only thing I've found so far is reviews on-line (sometimes Neweggs have the best sampling), any other suggestions? Is there some kind of hard-drive-consumer-report thingy out there?
My work here is dung.
Does this mean that Maxtor drives will stop sucking, or that Seagate drives will start to?
- Just because we CAN do a thing, does not mean we SHOULD do that thing.
There aren't many big players in the hard disk market.
I'm not that enthusisatic about loosing one of them.
Cheap, silent, low power consumption, long warranty, no failures yet.
This is just unfair.
I always liked Maxtor hard drives, they were rock stable, fast and silent.
I remember problems with some Seagate drives in Linux few years ago (related to DMA, some strange messages in kernel logs).
So I always tried to buy Fujitsu or Maxtor, and always tried to avoid Seagate.
Fujitsu stopped making hard drives and Maxtor has just been eaten.
What brand of hard drive should I choose in future? IBM?
So this will mean cheaper HDD prices? Or are we to expect more expensive or stagnant pricing due to the elimination of competition?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Bah - what happened to SuperDisks ?
All your drives are belong to us.
I wonder if Seagate will continue to manufacture Maxtor drives, or simply consolidate the entire company? Nothing quite as lucrative as owning your competition
Evil empires everywhere, the market share clumps, competition lessens!
Darth Seagate.... riiiise!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
I don't think this is a bad thing at all. Ever since I started using the new line of "fault resistant" Seagate drives (I believe they are called the NL35 series) I have been a big fan of Seagate. So far, I have purchased 66 hard drives, and not a single failure. (Knock on wood.) Of course, I'm using them in a server environment (reliable, high-end, clean power supplies) which surely makes a difference.
I am curious, however, what Seagate intends to do with the WD brand. Whether you're a fan or not, they have built a reputation over the last 15 years or so. I don't think Seagate bought them just to kill off the competition.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
When buying hard drives Seagate has always been my first choice, with Maxtor coming it second and Western Digital third. While this merger should mean the best of Seagate and Maxtor combined, it also means that there is a reduction in the number of brands that I consider acceptable, now only being Seagate and Western Digital. If Seagate was to start producing dodgy drives then that only leaves one real competitor, that I will use. I would then be forced into Western Digital, rather than now when I have a choice between two brands if one starts making less reliable drives.
I know that Hitachi, Samsung and others make hard drives, but I have had very bad experiences with both Hitachi and Samsung and so I refuse to use them. This merger just reduces the choice of companies that I trust - in other words, I have had a hard drive from and it has outlived its warranty, amoung other things.
anyone else read that as Seagate buys Maxtor for $1.98 ???
>>There aren't many big players in the hard disk market. >>I'm not that enthusisatic about loosing one of them. When I LOOSE things
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
- Winston Churchill
One large step for Meglocorp, one small death for mankind...
Not to be overdramatic, but I find it disheartning all this merging and acquision going on all the time. It makes my bones hurt. Pretty soon we will need a Corporate bible with Genisis start out like , Quantium begets Maxtor begets Seagate Blah Blah Blah.
The pursiut of power through money is astonishing. Hell Even I chase it. As a good Catholic once said, "God is dead".
Is that like, $1.9 x 10^9 or $1.9 x 2^30?
Adobe & Macromedia
Google & AOL (well 5% of)
Seagate & Maxtor
2005 has been a year of spending money for big players, it seems. Can anyone predict any more big moves before Dec. 1st?
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
a tiger eat a really gross bug.
I meta-moderate because I care.
Every drive will eventually fail. Every company has drives that fail. We've all had brand X last for Y years running 24/7 with no problems and we have all had brand Y fail after only a few months. Some of us have sent batches of bad drives back for repair and some have bought batches and had no problems. Warrenties are either 1,3, or 5 years, 1 being the most common for non SCSI drives. SCSI drives seem to be statistically better in quality and fail less often but costs more. Heat kills HD's. Drive models and even the manufactering date of certain drives change often so Brand Y 200GB may be completely different then then Brand Y 250GB model. You can not directly compare the two.
;)
Did I miss any
I continue to buy new old stock Quantum SCSIs. Not needing stupid big storage, I'll still pay extra for lifespan from product built when that mattered more than capacity. Also using gmirror on FreeBSD, which works as advertised. Your needs may vary, but I'm not comfortable with this acquisition; just where do you go for real choice in fat IDE disks?
Now that Seagate 'owns' Maxtor, will they make Maxtor drives better or just kill the product line off and just use Maxtor's facilities to churn out Seagate HDs? I had two Maxtors HDs crap out on me years ago and I washed my hands of them due to that. If you must buy/use a Maxtor HD, use it as a giant 'scratch pad' and don't save anything permanent on it!
As for Western Digital, other than their HDs running hot, I've had no data loss from them and would recommend them to anyone who can't get/afford Seagate.
Considering that the hard drive industry is already quite concentrated and that the largest company in the market is doing the buying, how can the justice department possibly approve this merger.
Then again, they approved of other such travesties as Exxon + Mobil, Viacom + CBS, Disney + Capital Cities, News Corp + Direct TV, and countless other clearly anti-competitive mergers throughout the last decade or two.
Allowing this merger will do nothing but slow down innovation and increase prices.
Has the Sherman Anti-Trust Act been repealed, or am I missing something here?
I remeber seeing a /. article a year or so ago that hard drive manufacturers are running VERY thin profit margins because of the competition. Looks like Maxtor couldn't keep up and became a casualty.
While I'm generally a fan of Seagate, all drives suck these days. I buy Seagate because they're the only drive with a 5 yr warranty. I now buy hard drives in pairs so I have a spare when one is being RMA'd.
2 160GB drives + RAID 0/1 controller is a pretty cheap backup solution with a guaranteed lifespan of at least 5 years.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
What kind?
Dude, do you want a harddrive or what?
There seems to be a trend in computers where there are 2 to 3 big alternatives. OSes -- Apple vs Mac vs *NIX/Linux. CPUs -- AMD vs Intel vs IBM. Disks -- Seagate vs Western Digital. Laptops -- Mac vs PC. Desktops -- Apple vs Dell.
I can't say that this is a good thing or not, but it seems to be a trend.
2002 - Hitachi buys IBM HD division
2006?- Seagate buys Quantum
So we're down to Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital and Samsung. Any other HD brands you see are OEM'd by them.
2006?- Seagate buys Maxtor
WTF Seagate's have allways been CRAP.. I compare Seagae quality to that of old Cyrix Proccesors, Everyone I have EVER had has burnt out/quit working. Maxtor is the only Drive I Use because I have never had a failure. I use desktop drives at home that run 24-7, and I've never seen anthing better. I use Seagate SCSI sever Drives at work and replace them, on a regular basis.. The only way I woudl use seagate at home is if I were uploading Digital content to the internet and wanted them crash as soon as the feds lifted my pc. But thats just my opinion...
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
All hard drives die. Do you think there's one magic brand that never breaks? They all do.
There might be varying levels of quality among specific brands and models, but data loss is inevitable if your only line of defense is faith in your bullet proof manufacturer who has never failed on you before. Everyone has one, and every one's is different. Some people have an incredible string of luck with Seagate, others with WD, etc. They all die. If you don't have a robust backup plan that you test regularly, you're going to get fucked at some point. If you've worked with computers long enough, you learn this and understand it.
I look at a hard drive like most people look at a roll of toilet paper. I use it, it serves its purpose, it gets discarded. The data on it, however, is nearly sacred, and I take every precaution I can afford to protect mine. If I lose data, then I feel like I lost a pet. But I don't have any special attachment to my hard drives whatsoever.
Having faith in a hard drive vendor is like a quaint superstition from the time when people were so poor that they might only have a single hard drive containing all the data they've ever generated in their entire lifetime.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Seagate may have a lot of reasons for wanting to absorb Maxtor. Certainly Seagate will ultimately profit from it, since Maxtor was a decently profitable company (recent slumps in its stockprice nothwithstanding). Eliminating a brand name it has to compete against in the increasingly difficult hard drive market is another.
I actually think that one of the larger reasons has to do with intellectual property. After being around for a bunch of years, Maxtor has a store of worthwhile patents on hard drive technology that Seagate could have a good use for. Being a competitor, it might have been difficult (read: $$$) or impossible for Seagate to license a Maxtor technology with Maxtor as an independent entity. There is also the intellectual property stored up in Maxtors employees: good talent can be hard to find, and if Seagate is expanding and developing more new technologies, it may have been a lot easier to just buy Maxtor (and gain its employees) rather than try expand its workforce at the slow pace of engineering and management recruiting/hiring.
It's funny to me how so many, supposedly logical and intelligent people, latch on to their limited and anecdotal experiences when it comes to hard drives. People are quick to state their favorites based on a single failure or a single lack of failure. Even in the parent post he dismisses an entire brand (Western Digital) simply because they now make a drive under the name of one that failed, for him, years ago when it was manufactured by a different company. That's completely illogical!
You can't really make a judgment on a particular drive until you have tried (stress tested) hundreds of them. To dismiss a brand based on a single drive failure is ridiculous and it's moronic to dismiss a brand that you haven't even tried! Yet, starting with the first post, look at all those that follow this twisted logic in forming their opinions.
Combining patents is a very good point. Personally I've had the opposite experience, Maxtor failures and Seagate quality, but that just shows you the wonders of insignificant sample sizes.
Let's hope the merged company can produce even better products, not by laying people off, but by overcoming intellectual property barriers that previously existed between the two companies.
With all the mention of Western Digital's failing, I haven't had one die on me yet. (Yes, I know, it will probably be ironic that one dies today). To the story, I think this is a big move for Seagate and I hope they can utilize some of the greatness in the Maxtor drives.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
On the other hand, I have had one of your beloved Maxtors totally crap out on me after only having it for 6 months?
What does this mean? Nothing. Hard drives are no different from elevisions or laptops any other piece of complicated equipment when it comes to reliability - on large scale average all the big brands have simmilar failure rates plus or minus a percentage point.
If you are worried about your data theres just a few you can do.
That's about it - loyalty to a given brand will get you nowhere, in the end they are all the same - for the most part good, but a bad batch once in a while.
Personally, I just buy the cheapest drives I can find and run them in my RAID array. If one fails, no big deal. And it saves a ton of cash.
from the ancient 100MB seagates that i've still got knocking around to the brand new 160GB one i purchased just the other week, they've always been the most reliable brand in my experience, i hope we don't end up with cheap maxtor style seagate badged drives with similarly high error rates and poor stability.
The first one has been replaced under warranty and purrs nicely in the machine I'm typing on. The second one has been away for a month or two and I still didn't get a replacement.
The disk that has the longest active life in my "collection" is a IBM 18Gig SCSI harddisk that is in the server of my parents. It has been working for over 4 years 24/7. Before that it lived in our (heavily used) family desktop for at least 4 years (IIRC). 8 years and still having an active and useful life. Not bad for a harddisk.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I also find the illiterate use of the word "loose" to be annoying, but in this case it is gramatically (sp? damn...) correct. We have allowed Maxtor to be lost, therefore we didn't lose it, we loosed it. Just like loosing your dog (not the same as losing your dog).
To lose it is accidental, to loose it is on purpose.
However, considering how fucking illiterate most of the internet is, it's hard to tell what the parent poster actually meant.
-mcgrew (mrc-"authors")
Now that Seagate 'owns' Maxtor, will they make Maxtor drives better or just kill the product line off and just use Maxtor's facilities to churn out Seagate HDs?
And pray tell, why the hell do you think that a Seagate drive produced at the same facility with the same equipment would be different than a Maxtor drive? Loyal to the sticker perhaps?
I bet you're one of those people who have a "Piss on Ford" bumper sticker too eh?
...or does it seem like almost every major national/international market end up in what is essentially a duopoly with a few other minor players? Usually they're red vs blue, too-
Target vs Wal-Mart
Home Depot vs Lowe's
Coke vs Pepsi
Republicans vs Democrats
CVS vs Walgreen's
Nike vs Reebok
Verizon vs Cingular
Firestone vs Goodyear
Marlboro vs Camel
...
There are a lot more that I can't think of right now. I guess since monopolies often get broken up, things tend to stabilize at duopolies...
I have bought Seagate drives simply because they had 5 year warranty compared to tiny warranties on Maxtor and Western Digital...I had western digital fail on me in the third year.
Feels like a good friend just got shot in the head[Preferred Link].
I was in the orthodontists office today and there was a Gamerz PC mag on the table with a sidebar about 16GB flash drives from Hitachi coming out next year. Now at $400 it's pretty damn pricey but the cost will obviously drop with time. Seems to me you could bundle a few of these together, put them in a small package and have a relatively sturdy non mechanical drive that could replace most platter drives.
Over the last few years, I've used Western Digital and IBM/Hitachi pretty much exclusively, primarily IBM/Hitachi. I've never had a problem ever with either brand. About a dozen or so drives over the past several years and they were only ever replaced for bigger/faster drives, never because of a defect or problem. I guess I'll really stay away from Seagate now. But I'm not sure why everyone seems to have horror stories about IBM/Hitachi. I've found them to be fast, quiet, and reliable. In fact, although I will pick up a WD if it's on sale, Hitachi is usually a few dollars cheaper and not as loud as a typical WD drive, in my experience.
Combines don't always combine to become more powerful, in fact companies usually combine to save their asses.
This merger isn't about making more profits -- it is about cutting the bleeding that has occured now that hard drive space is a commodity. How many hard drive companies did we have 10 years ago versus today? Do you recall all the companies that are gone now?
How can you look at the prices of hard drives versus the number of companies and see a problem? You're pushing me to think you want regulations added to prevent these merges, but I'm happily buying 300GB hard drives for under $100 and I'm very happy.
Every new computer should buy the crapiest HDD they can find, so it will fail on them early in life (when they have less important data to lose) and teach them the valuable lesson to backup important data.
Seems that every single experienced computer user has gone through such an ordeal in life, be it with HDD's, floppy disks or even tape and only _after_ they lost important stuff will they backup.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Did anyone else read the headline as Seagate buys Maxtor for $1.98 ? That's about what their drives are worth.
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
I don't know much about the manufacture of hard drive other than they have to be clean and sealed from dirt. I had a WD drive fail yesterday, luckily I was only playing around with it. After I removed it, I removed a small round piece of metal tape from the side of the drive and it exposed the platters! I knew that WD drives were junk, I did not know that they were S***. To Stay on topic, I hope that Seagate will improve the Maxtor drives, as I only had one seagate drive fail on me (it was older than I was at the time) and it was a 20MB MFM drive. I only trust seagate drives, although my notebook has an IBM that has not failed yet knock on wood.
sudo mod me up
This move will likely bring Seagate more exposure to the budget PC market. However, I've personally witnessed a disproportionately high number of Maxtor drives fail (while working in the PC support department of a five-campus technical college, and drives owned by friends), so I've long had a policy of never buying from them.
What do you mean?
One can only hope that someone comes up with some paradigm shift in storage
Blu-Ray?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
The purchase price was $2.9B with a $1B mail in rebate.
Very professional reviews and they keep up with failure rates...
Now time for corrections:
#1 Hitachi (NOT Western Digital) took over the deskstar line.
#2 Hitachi is actually one of the best builders now
(if people would stop holding onto past problems before the line switched hands)
It is now one of the higher quality consumer HD manufactors
(*they are head to head performance wise with WD, some can run toe to toe with the WD Raptor (10k rpm SATA) while being only 7200rpm themselves. Hitachi also has a very good reliabilty ratio compared to the other manufactors now (and has mantained it for 2 years)
My general suggestions to buyers now is:
#1 Buy Seagate if you want the warrenty, but your in for the slowest comparitive drives of the bunch.
#2 If everything is between Hitachi and Western Digital, lean to Hitachi.
#3 Go Maxtor if you are cheap OR if you find a good value on the MaxLine series
1. does this need to be approved? seems like a big acquisition.
/home.....it'll save you a lot of time and effort.
:)
2. doesn't everyone in Linux world use rdiff-backup?
http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/
Next drive you buy - keep your old one if you can - even if it's much smaller, use rdiff-backup, and backup selected parts of your
3. Maybe we need a KDE front end for our newer users?
On eBay you can already buy a maxtor drive for $59.90!
Oh, I should read the article? One moment.
Buying the company blablabla. Hum, check it out on eBay: Rare Maxtor drive for sale. Soon not available anymore, will be collectors item with vastly increased value.
P.S. This is a random first hit on eBay. I am in no way associated to this seller. If you maxtor collectors item does not increase in value, do not complain to me. I warned you!
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Of course they all fail, but I've also been in the field long enough to observe trends. The fact is, particular makes and models of drives were notoriously poor in the area of reliability. The confusion and conflicting stories you hear usually stem from people trying to over-simplify it to "Brand X is better than brand Y!" In this industry, you simply can't do that.
For example, back in the early 90's, I ran a very popular BBS. I had multiple computers running 24/7 and constantly being accessed, loading and saving data to their drives. At that time, the Seagate SCSI drives like the Barracuda were the highest performance drives available, so I tried using them. I had one failure after another. Always bearing issues. The fact is, those drives ran *hot* and keeping them sufficiently cooled in anything resembling a standard PC tower case was nearly impossible, so they'd self-destruct. Did this make Seagate a "bad company"? No, but it told me their high-performance, expensive drives weren't appropriate for my needs.
Earlier on, I had many other failures with Seagate drives, but this was way back in the day when the standards were MFM and RLL. The very popular Seagate ST-238R (30MB!) drive was always losing data and going bad on people, for example.
None of this means anything as to reliability of today's IDE Seagate drives, though. And with my recent poor experiences with Maxtor SATA drives (failing immediately outside the 1 year warranty period), I'm currently a fan of Seagate for those.
I'm a consultant, and let me tell you that hard drive failures know no brand loyalties with modern drives. We see more dead laptop drives than desktop drives, but that's because of the rougher treatment.
B randMostReliable
But even the (relatively) large numbers of drives we see is anecdotal. Let's hear from the *real* experts:
http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-index.php?page=
-R
This is how I backup my mp3s.
:)
- Burn them on DVDs (60GB = 15 DVDs).
- Give one set to my brother for Christmas.
- Give another set to my friend for Christmas.
- Keep a private server going and encourage my friends to get the latest stuff.
I've had a hard drive crap out on me and I've lost a ton of mp3s before but I had copies at some place or another. Sharing your data with your family and friends is one sure way to have a distributed backup system. Now, you don't control their data but chances are if they have big harddrives they'll keep that stuff around.
This is how I backup my documents:
- compress it every month or so and make a copy on each hard drive on my computer. Occasionally I backup to CD. Actually I think this data has less backups than my mp3s, even though it's some of it's important, but I could always embed a password protected file into one of my mp3 disks that no one would notice.
Now it's down to Seagate and Western Digital as far as quality Hard Drives go. It seems to me that just about every OEM you can buy ships with a cheap Maxtor HD. Will Seagate continue the Maxtor line, or will they dump them and continue to make quality hard drives in place of Maxtor? I think the wost case senerio would have Seagate slapping Seagate stickers on top of Maxtor-quality Hard Drives. Yikes, that would be bad for Seagate's image IMO.
2006:
Micro$oft & ((Adobe & Macromedia) & (Google & AOL (well 5% of)) & (Seagate & Maxtor))
Too often people reference something they know little about but sounds good and then it gets modded high here but equally ignorant people. Look, research something before spouting off OK?
Consolidation doesn't always lead to a monopoly. A quick search of google would have netted you a large list of hard drive manufacturers disproving your chicken with its head cut off reaction.
Hell your entire list is nothing more than a cut and paste job from any anti-capitalist but ignorance abundance site.
We need to be able to mod comments ignorant.
Whoops, I just misread that headline as "Seagate buys Maxtor for $1.98". Puts a whole new spin on the story!
At that price, I'll take 5 Hard Drive manufactures!
Seagate buying Maxtor is a symptom of the cost of entry being high. It is cheaper for even an established player like Seagate to buy an existing company than it is for them to expand their manufacturing, distribution, and R&D departments. This has NOTHING to do with government regulation, and has everything to do with the high buy-in price of mature high-tech industries.
For the same reasons the idea of an upstart challenging established monopolies (if we ever get to that point) is pie-in-the-sky idealism (or I should say libertarianism in your case). The margins are too low, the capitol needed is too high, and the technology too expensive to develop independently (and a minefield of patents to negotiate.)
Flash memory has a limited number of write cycles available to it. Even if that number is in the millions, you could use up a flash drive in a hurry in the wrong circumstances. On Linux, for instance, you would probably want to mount a flash filesystem with the noatime option - otherwise, every file access will update the access timestamp, adding to wear on the flash.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
If I lose data, then I feel like I lost a pet.
Woah there! Maybe you are taking this data thing too seriously.
Come to think of it... I used to be just like you. I always had redudant copies of hard drives, then copies of those, and then I went all the way and got a RAID controller and started out with Raid 5 but I figured that wasn't good enough to I mirrored that...
After about 10 years of doing this (since 1995... I still got backups of my old IBM PS1 on my current computer) I realized:
"What the fuck do I need all this data for?"
I've got shit I don't even remember. Hard drives just laying in my closet full to the brim of stuff I don't even know what is on. CDRs and CDRs of shit I backed up but yet I don't know what good it will do me because everything I now use is stuff I downloaded or bought in the last 6 months.
Maybe I'm too ADD, but I just can't keep up with crap that I did even a year ago that is worth keeping.
My suggestion to break this cycle. Pull out a random hard drive from a closet (or computer) that you can't remember what you put on it and format it and install something like Ubuntu or whatever OS you want to play around with.
It feels painful at first as you watch the progress of the install go by when you know you could be loosing valuable data, but you know what... If you can't remember what you put on their it probaly wasn't worth keeping.
Yes, data hording is an addiction and I had the same problem too so I understand how hard it can be to try to keep bit of data I have came across in my life time. I still need to ebay all these seagate drives...
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Actually it's $2.6 billion, with a $700 million rebate.
And that puppy expires December 31, so they'd better remember to send it in.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
The margins are too low, the capitol needed is too high, and the technology too expensive to develop independently (and a minefield of patents to negotiate.)
Yeah, patents have nothing to do with government over-regulating.
One point you missed is a very important one: these companies might be on the verge of death, and when a market disappears, you see many companies trying to stay alive by merging.
Will hard drives be on the desktop in 1 year? Probably. 2 years? Still looks good. 5 years? I'm not so sure. My buddy has a 2GB and a 4GB SD card. Nearly 100% of my data is held on someone else's server, so I am happily using my 6GB hard drive and my 4 2GB SD cards for things I need locally. In fact, now that I have 150kbps-600kbps everywhere I go (T-Mobile's EDGE network combined with WiFi service plans), I don't see any need for storing data on a hard drive.
Will mega-ISPs need hard drives? Absolutely. Yet hard drives can be one of the biggest bottlenecks for huge-bandwidth websites. It is far easier to stream data from memory than from magnetic media.
What does all this babbling mean? I think the hard drive manufacturers see the writing on the wall. Even with 60TB hard drives, memory is quickly catching up, and prices are quickly dropping. I'll be very surprised if we see hard drives in 20 years.
I've encountered a tremendous amount of suckage from Maxtor drives over the years (my punishment for buying on price alone). Seagate drives have been a little bit more expensive but much more reliable.
So will Maxtor drives improve now? Or Seagate ones get worse?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Completely anecdotal evidence follows:
I think the difference between Maxtor drives and Western Digital drives is that Maxtor drives will let you know in advance they are going to fail (sounds, etc). Western Digital drives just fail with no warning.
I hope this merger will keep the high quality I've come to expect from both Seagate and Maxtor.
In a complicated device like a hard drive, if an assembly line is tooled to produce drive X, that is all it can produce. Period. It is not like you can flip a switch and have 1000 Seagate drives roll off the line in the mornning and have 1000 totally different Maxtor drives roll off the line in the afternoon.
Any drives produced off of that line would be identical until it was retooled, regardless of the company that owns the plant.
Do you recall all the companies that are gone now?
I recall one: JTS
With quality like that, I bet a lot of people who worked on computers during those years will remember them for quite some time.
What does all this babbling mean? I think the hard drive manufacturers see the writing on the wall. Even with 60TB hard drives, memory is quickly catching up, and prices are quickly dropping. I'll be very surprised if we see hard drives in 20 years.
The idea that because of your anecdotal experience hard drives are going the way of the dodo bird anytime soon is ludicrous.
Increasing acceptance of 5+ megapixel digital cameras. Increasing uptake of digital video cameras. Increasing sale of downloadable video. Increasing sale of DVRs, the soon to be HD video revolution.
If you are suggesting that solid state storage is going to be able to keep up with hard drives (in the foreseeable future) for the world's exponentially growing storage demands...
You were smart to qualify your statements with the "20 years" addition, but conjecturing on the 2025 world is not helpful in this context.
Some replys suggest xcopy32 or Norton Ghost to make mirror backups. I suggest Robocopy ("robust copy") from (yea, I know I know) Microsoft. It comes in the Win 2003 Server RK, or Google it. It includes a lot of options more suited to performing mirror operations, especially when copying over a network.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
it may have been a lot easier to just buy Maxtor (and gain its employees) rather than try expand its workforce at the slow pace of engineering and management recruiting/hiring.
The cynic in me says that seagate doesn't give a rat's ass about maxtor's employees, even if it would be wise to keep them. I sure wouldn't want to be a maxtor employee right now. Expect a bloodbath.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
As digital cameras finally catch up to analog ones (or have they?) I see more need for memory based storage over hard drives. Try to take 8 megapixel uncompressed photographs as quickly as you can with an analog camera, and even the fastest hard drives with the biggest write-cache will choke. Hard drives require more memory, can't hold up to banging and shaking, and just don't cut it for heavy duty use in any environment.
Will hard drives stay ahead of memory? Maybe for the time being -- but there is a limitation to how cheap they can go, IMHO. They're adding more data per inch, they're making them slightly faster in read/write speeds, and they're definitely becoming cheap, but there will soon be a day that memory drives will overtake hard drives in price. You have more companies working on memory technologies than on hard drive technologies, and that competition will aid in making magnetic storage obsolete.
I'm not saying my opinion is correct, but I'm one who has faith in research and development, and I know that magnetic storage is so-1970. Even 2D memory storage is about 10 years outdated. What is next? The replacment for both, and it isn't 20 years away.
Platters have mis writes all the time. They're just smart ergo S.M.A.R.T. to be able to re write to new sector. Seems to me a rather minor technical obstacle that can be overcome.
No, but back in the early '90s was when Seagate couldn't be trusted to follow the ATA/IDE spec and setting up their drives with a Maxtor, WD, or Samsung in a master-slave configuration was not guaranteed to work, and I'd say that's a good chunk toward making them a bad company, or at least a horribly impolite one. :)
The only hard disks I ever could get their drives to talk to reliably were made by Kalok. And, well, being Kalok, that was until I had to replace the Kalok drive for bad sectors, or loud screeching noises, or... [Note that Kalok's hard disks looked physically a surprising amount like the previous generation of Seagate. Corporate espionage, perhaps, and a nice bootleg Korean manufacturing facility? Hmmmmm]
I sold mostly WD and Maxtor during that time frame; funny that they lasted this long, as I suspect that most computer retailers of the time had the same issues I did-- if you sold a customer a Seagate, it often came back as it wouldn't play nicely as a slave drive, if you sold a customer a Kalok, it died a horrendous death inside of a few months, and nobody had customers who could afford Micropolis...
-JDF
I know where you're coming from. I still have QIC-40 tape backups from one of my oldest PCs. Hell, I still have floppies *and cassettes* saved from my first Atari 1200. Here's my problem now:
The floppies and cassettes are so old as to have lost much of the data on them. (I confess I haven't stored them properly; but, even had I done so, there is still a good chance of data loss.) And the QIC tapes I have no device capable of reading now. I am quite certain there's some old letters, poems, songs, and other miscellaneous writings on those tapes written with a word processor that's no longer available. So, even if I had a device capable of reading the tapes and restoring the data, I still would need to find a way to get the data out of that old proprietary format and into a format I can use now.
You are correct about the painful part, too. I started throwing old crap away when I had an epiphany similar to yours. Even knowing I'm throwing away things I haven't touched in 20 years and if I did restore it and convert it to a usable format, I still probably would be either: (a) unimpressed; (b) underwhelmed; and/or, (c) embarrassed by it. It's still difficult letting go of it.
Where was this point made? Easy for someone to miss an unmade point.
Not to be overdramatic, but I find it disheartning all this merging and acquision going on all the time.
Are you new to watching the corporate space?
Mergers happen as a fad, and then the spinning off/focus on the core fad happens, and every company splits into 9 entities, selling off "non-core" assets to other companies, and then it repeats. This has been going on in the corporate space for time eternal, and it's how the executive level can keep giving them huge commissions, err bonuses, every time they do one of these big money maneuvers. Strangely they don't return the bonus when the bonehead move is reversed a few years later.
In any case, hard drives are a mature technology, and it should be expected that the field coalesces. Soon enough a disruptive technology (large scale flash with HD-like speeds, optical storage, whateer) and a millions startups will appear pushing their variant, and the cycle renews.
Just what we needed, less competition, shorter waranties, lower MTBF, higher cost... In short, Monopoly. I don't claim this purchase achieves that all by itself, but I don't think this bodes well as part of a trend. :-(
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
My only concern about this is, whether the merger will make Maxtor Drives better (one can only hope) or make Seagate drives worse (I hope not). We can all remember what happened to the quality of Maxtor drives after they bought Quantum. What a mess!
A warranty is a good measure of how reliable a manufacturer EXPECTS a drive to be, not how reliable it actually is. The deathstars, for example, were much more failure prone than IBM expected. There is no way to know about issues like that from warranty information. MTBF numbers usually given out are the same thing, not based in actual data but based on engineering estimates.
g in
To know how reliable a drive is, you have to know actual failure rates. Only the manufacturer is typically in a position to accurately measure those and they pretty much never give it out without an NDA or court order. We on the outside are left manually piecing together the data using methods like The storage review drive reliablity survey:
http://www.storagereview.com/map/lm.cgi/survey_lo
which attempts to gather accurate statistics from large samplings from users. This seems like a lot of work but hopefully it will pry the window open and convince manufacturers that it won't be the end of the world if people know how reliable their drives actually are.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Flash drives have read and write limits. They are not meant to be constantly accessed like hard drives.
That means AOL was worth 50 times as much as Maxtor? Yikes.
What a way to *drive* the competition out of business...
Thank you. I'm here 'til Thursday. Try the veal!
Mind the gap...
Spin as you will.. even if:
/. is good for you.
You know, I see a lot of bitchin' here that goes like "I had one of those fail on me so I never used them again."
Face it - there's gonna be a certain number of bad drives from every manufacturer.
I personally have had real good luck with Maxtor drives. I only ever had trouble with just one of their drives. A 40 Gbyte drive that I installed failed after 4 months. I sent it back, Maxtor had a replacement to me within a week and that replacement is still running 3 years later in a client's system.
I hope Seagate maintains that level of warranty service.
Ahh... Micropolis... Fast, reliable, and it can be counted to regularly thermal-recal with a sound not unlike flatulence.
Why not Connor? Back In The Day(tm) they were the best compromise between price, performance, and reliability. A friend of mine recently had one give up the ghost after ten years of constant service.
I am listening to loud music and Iming. I meant "drives" not "drivers".
I do not own 199 drives but I meant my drive from 1999.
Well that was an embarrasing post.
http://saveie6.com/
I first read the title as "Seagate buys Maxtor for $1.98" which gave me images of Rip Taylor tossing confetti in the air.
Geoff
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
seriously, i have a quantum bigfoot (with a giant 4 GB capacity) that has been running since late 1996/early 1997. i recently had a western digital wd800 die on me after SIX FUCKING MONTHS of light use!!! i hate WD. >=(
I have an IBM in my box and it's been fine. The 4 Seagates I've owned have been fine. My friend had a drive that played up and was making heck of a noise. It wasn't either of the above. However, I don't consider them a bad manufacturer just because of one faulty drive. I know other guys who swear by them for quality.
Hard Drives are a good free market. If one of them gets a bad reputation, they typically pull their socks up and get the quality back on line. The only exception to this would be OEM systems, which will use anything just to keep the cost down.
I'd standardized on Seagate drives after having extremely high failure rates with OTC Maxtor drives. I guess I'll never buy another Seagate now...
When Maxtor bought Quantum HDD, Maxtor was somewhat profitable. Both Maxtor and Quantum brought good balance sheets to the deal with a few hundred million in cash each. Quantum sold because they could not see a path to profitability. Maxtor bought because the executives had a hard on to do an aquisition.
The end result of this first merger was a disaster. The combined company has been limping along and losing market share. The biggest plus on the balance sheet is "goodwill". This "goodwill" is the amount Maxtor paid for Quantum over the value of the tangible assets. This "goodwill" at this point in time is just accounting bullshit. Without the goodwill, Maxtor may have negative value for the tangible assets.
I have been wondering if Maxtor would get purchased soon. I think Seagate is just paying to have one less competitor.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
No one's made "Sea-Tor" or "Max-Gate" jokes yet?
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
Fro a consumer standpoint I care about only one thing: how will I distinguish now Seagate technology HDD and Maxtor technology HDD.
The reason there are multiple brands out there is that everyone prefers different parameters for his drive, so just merging the brands doesn't help.
Maxtor drives are noiser, relatively reliable, and can hold with high temperatures.
Seagate are quiet (their "liquid" bearing or something), also relatively reliable, but also quite easily f*ck up with temperatures of 48-50 and above (so I gotta constantly monitor my drive in hotter days, not to go overboard).
I prefer to have a choice.
I dunno. Seagate has the 5 year warranty. Hopefully, this will mean they will keep that 5 year warranty, and also have it for Maxtor's drives.
I bet they make Maxtor their cheap brand though and keep them with a 1 year warranty.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Is this the end of /. I have been going to both /. and digg.com for about a month now and i am finding more and more that articles that apear on /. are taken from digg. many times i find myself getting the geek news i crave from digg and then leter seing it on /. could this be the end of /. supremecy for all news geekyness
Don't forget Black People vs Niggas
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
The last time I had a Segate drive (10Yrs ago) it crashed within 3 months and had to be returned. I bought it in Conn but by now I now lived in Ia. Seagate wouldn't even talk to me. I was told to send the HD back to were I bought it for repair/replacment. The place I bought it was no longer in busniess. So I was screwed out of a 3month old drive. I haven't bought a Seagate drive since due to their customer support policy.
Just yesterday, I ran a 14-year-old Seagate drive (a whole 100 megabytes) with the cover off. And took pictures.
The drive still runs fine. No bad sectors from this ordeal.
For what it's worth, this isn't the first time I've done this trick (although it is the first time I took pictures). A few years ago, I ran an ancient 120MB drive with the top off, hoping to create bad sectors to test a disk imaging utility I was working on. That drive remained annoyingly error-free for a week before I killed it with a screwdriver.
It was a Maxtor, for what that's worth.
Unfortunately, I was a die-hard Maxtor fan until in the last two years I have had 2 Maxtor drives fail, and have seen at least 4 more go on the fritz at our company. I always recommended Seagate or Western Digital because Maxtor doesn't meet the reliability grade. Looks as if I will only be recommending Western Digital, because who knows what kind of crap drives Seagate will produce now with the Maxtor shit line folding into their existing business... why do they do this to customers? I will not be buying any Seagate drives until at least 2007, when I may see some actual performance and reliability numbers in lab tests.
This merger isn't about making more profits -- it is about cutting the bleeding that has occured now that hard drive space is a commodity.
... come on man, you know that.
And the only want to stop the bleeding is to make more profits
will crash a lot and be really noisy now? yippie
But I did still have the backups. So I finally started just erasing the tapes and made an offer to give the drives and media away for the cost of postage. The SyQuest drives and carts went via eBay.
Heck, everything that was on the Amiga barely takes up any space on the Linux fileserver. The Mac Performa's HDD fit on a CD-ROM. The iMac's old drive is in a FireWire cage plugged in to the Mini, mounted read-only. (That's not easy. There's no direct support I can find for having DiskUtility make something read-only, you have to do it with BSD stuff.)
I've only just gotten around to destroying bills and stuff from 1990; it's not like any it matters, not even if the tax people audit me. (And audits only go back 7 years, tops.)
I think I might be a packrat....
Lets face it. All hard drives will fail eventually. Many hard drives will fail before their warranty ends. If you work in a large company with hundreds of mirrored hard drives you can expect almost weekly disk failures. Because of that I select my hard drives mainly based on how easy it is to get a replacement when one dies. Maxtor is MUCH better than Seagate in that category.
Here is my order of preference and why:
1. WDC - pretty simple and fast RMA procedure
2. Maxtor - Was #1 but now they have a policy where you can only put 1 RMA on a credit card so if I have 3 advanced RMAs out (unfortunately not uncommon) I have to use 3 different credit cards. Almost stayed #1 though because in my experience Maxtor drives tend to give the most warning that they are about to fail.
3. IBM/Hitachi - Doesn't do advanced RMA at all. They do ship pretty fast but I still want an advanced RMA.
4. Seagate - Horrible RMA procedure. First you fill out the web form which requires and checks for IE or Netscape (not moz of firefox). Then you have to call with your RMA number to ask that it be changed to an advanced RMA. Then you find out that they CHARGE $24.95 for people who want fast replacements. I currently have hundreds of Quantum/Maxtor drives in use and RMA them all the time. I really don't want to have to deal with Seagate on them.
5. Samsung - I haven't actually tried to RMA one of these. In fact I don't believe I have ever even seen one. I may have to try one now. Anyone try to get an advanced RMA on one yet?
"What the fuck do I need all this data for?"
For pr0n, you insensitive clod!
Some high density platter 10k rpm SATA drives out of the merged company I'd be happy. I'd like to actually push my SATA connection for a change instead of having a lot of wasted bandwidth.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
I've been building desktops and servers for many years and for the past couple Maxtor is the WORST disk to go with. In the last 2 months I have dealt with 7 failures from all different sites. All 7 ? Maxtor drives. I have many of all brands out there and Seagate has been the most reliable by far for the desktop/small server market. I hope they don't change that.. there is nothing fun about losing a disk.. or should I say dealing with someone who has lost a disk that is not backed up :)
My name is coaxeus, and I approve this message. In fact, I think it is awesome.
And the only want to stop the bleeding is to make more profits ... come on man, you know that.
And this is bad?
Profit is not evil. Profit isn't even financial. Profit only means gaining something for yourself.
Every time we interact with other people, we generally profit. You pay $2 for a hot dog, and both parties profit. The seller gains $2 and you gain a hot dog. Mutual satisfaction.
Financial profit doesn't always mean financial gain, either. Individuals and companies need profits to cover any future shortfalls. Profits are used to expand research and development, hire new people, and service old customers.
I don't even see a problem with price gouging. If a catastrophe happens in a given market, I expect (and would gladly pay) for any temporary "gouging." Imagine a gas station that normally receives 100 gallons a week (to keep it easy). Imagine them selling the gas for $2 to stay competitive with other stations. Now, they see a major problem in gas supply -- they may not get gas for 4 weeks. They have 200 gallons in their reserves, but they still have to pay the landlord, the employees, the utilities and the regulatory costs of staying in business. They won't be getting gas for 4 weeks, so they can only sell 50 gallons a week before they run out. Their overhead stays the same, so those 50 gallons won't sell for $2 a gallon, they might sell for $5 or $6 per gallon, leaving a massive profit, but none of that profit is a gain.
Profits are GOOD, and profits are equitable. The only time you trade with another against your will is when you pay a thief who is holding a gun to your head, or when you pay government, who will eventually hold a gun to your head if you don't.
Maxtor's MaxLine III series come with a 5 year warranty. 250 GB (S-ATA version) of that costs me around 143 USD here (in Sweden).
For a city of Population: 79,093 Longmont, CO is heavily invested in these two companies. Check out a couple of their locations:
l ongmont,+co+to+389+Disc+Dr,+longmont+co&ll=40.1479 79,-105.152807&spn=0.042694,0.081702&t=h&hl=en
n t+co,+to+2270+S+88th+Street,+Louisville,+CO&ll=40. 061782,-105.116501&spn=.341985,.653618&hl=en
:)
Maxtor is the start point and Seagate is the stop.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=2452+Clover+Basin,+
It's also not far from Seagate to industry old, dog StorageTek. They don't compete head to head but are in a related market:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=389+Disc+Dr,+longmo
Maybe this should be called the Magnetic Plateau.
I worked in a it shop, and i never knew of a single kalok surviving even days after the warranty expired. Kalok was the pcchips of its day, the worst thing you could get.
From those days, i still have a 100% working (zero bad sectors) 3 1/2" IDE (ata) 80mb Seagate (ST3096A). Its last days were spent on a 24hrs dial up BBS i turned off around 97. The drive still works fine. I also used to have a 5 1/4" MFM 40mb Seagate drive (ST251N?) which was used in the same machine; before it, the machine had a 5 1/4" RLL 30mb Seagate ST238R which i used to have on an XT back in the day.
Of the home/desktop drives, Quantum used to be reliable as well, with Western Digital and Maxtor being ok, but about nothing else. Turned out Maxtor got Quantum, and now Seagate got Maxtor; so all that is left is Seagate, Western Digital and the bunch of "newcomers".
I do seem to recall a couple of slave/master issues, but not many. "Cable Select" mode would likely fail with different brands, but the regular master/alave configuration usually worked; maybe one specific drive had to always be the master, but that was about it. Upgrade paths usually involved replacing the drive for a bigger one anyways.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Dude, if the "data" on your roll of toilet paper is something that you consider "nearly sacred", then you've got some serious mental issues. I mean, it's okay to be proud, but that's taking things a little too far.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
I swear by seagates, and this is why;
I've had WDs take huge dumps many times, I've never liked the preformance of the Maxtors I've run. However, the Seagates I've had have always preformed well, and the ONE seagate I did have die on me I set on a shelf and a few months later (this was a 130MB drive) I grabbed it to see if I could get some of the data off... It worked GREAT, I was still able to use the drive for another year. That is untill my friends started laughing at me because I was the only one that didn't have AT LEAST a 210MB drive...
*sigh* those were the days.
There are several things that give you good life from your drives:
I've had SCSI server drives die every 3 months... until I watched the CSR putting the new drive in and pointed out the cooling fan on that particular sled wasn't spinning. (Sadly, he had no idea what to do about that, so I let him use one of my spare sleds... I just wanted the damn machine working again. A better CSR got the defective fan replaced.)
An entire line of IBM RS/6000s was made with the cooling vents around the drives blocked, because the cut-out in the acoustic damping foam hadn't been removed at the factory. Once the CSR knew about this, he and I went through the entire machine room, pulling all those foam strips out. Disk failure rates dropped way down.
I'm running the near-cheapest-per-gigabyte OEM PATA IDE drives with 8mb buffers and 7200 RPM spindles. So not absolute junk, but sure nothing special. Retrospect does incremental backup on all systems every night, to multiple archive drives. I've had one drive die--a laptop HDD in an external USB cage. (Turns out, that one was running too hot--I'm very glad I never put it in the laptop, it would have been much too hot in there.)
But I'm prepared if a drive dies--that makes all the difference. I don't know how they do it, but drives can really tell if you desperately need them to keep working. And that's when they crash.
Further, modern drives really are a lot better than those from 5-10 years ago. There are much fewer cases of thermal cracking in control boards leading to drive failures. With nearly-all-in-one-chip control board designs, there is much less wiring to fail, the circuit boards are smaller and simpler. Power controllers are better and run cooler. (Though my 250 GB Maxtor is handy when I want to fry eggs for breakfast....) Fluid dynamic bearings run quieter. Everything is voice-coil actuated--remember stepper motor HDDs? (Want some? I've still got a couple around.)
You've only listed the players in the 3.5" and 2.5" markets. Toshiba is a big player in the 1.8" market. MagicStor makes a decent amount of ATA drives in the 1.0" market. I guess you could also count Cornice in the 1.0" market, although they don't make ATA drives, they use a proprietary interface.
You also missed 1989 - Seagate buys Imprimis. Before that purchase, Seagate's drives were reliable and affordable but also low performance and loud.
There are also other companies that no longer make drives, like Rodime, Micropolis and JTS. But tracking down those, they seem to not have been folded into any other storage company, they just disappeared. What ever happened to Fujitsu as a drive maker?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Man that must be one huge pr0n collection!
This is insightful?
;-)
Just because you have a problem hording away data you don't need doesn't mean there's nothing worth keeping. This is more true of businesses where for legal reasons records need to be kept for a certain ammount of time, but personally I'd be annoyed if I lost all the data / documents / software / images / etc I had.
Besides documents and such I'd lose, massive pr0n loss can be devistating.
There is a hard drive manufacturer on the loose - we're all going to die!
Most high end drives have 5 year warranties. Hitachi's ultrastar is 5 years. Maxtor's Atlas and MaXLine is 5 years. Western digital's Raptor is 5 years. Probably many more.
Yes, but think of the advantage... if WWIII breaks out or an ice age and thousands of years from now, someone comes across my basement and manages to extract the data, they'll have a gold mine... think of it... my papers from high school, college, etc. They'll be in heaven! Heck, they could reconstruct nethack and possibly MS Windows which they would then install and crash all of their technological society!!!!!
There is a Universal Life Value Check it
These days it doesn't matter so much. As you say, stay away from the bottom end of the market. But in the mid nineties SCSI drives generally were better. I use to sputter platters for IBM. The SCSI drive platters all came from either the San Jose or Munich plants. The "deathstar" IDE platters mostly came from Hungary. This was true for most parts in the drive. The consistently better parts flowed to the higher end drives.
I misread the headline initially and thought it said $1.98. I was like, "Wow, what my friends said about Maxtor's worth was true!"
Does anyone really see the competition regulators allowing this to go ahead ? I seriously doubt it.
I don't understand all this talk about "Seagate 5 year warranty, Maxtor suxors, etc." Maxtor and the other companies offer drives with different warranties. My 250GB Maxtor has a 5 year warranty for example; you get what you pay for.
Initially I saw "Seagate buys Maxtor for $1.98"...I think that would be a lot more accurate reflection of what Maxtor's worth, anyway.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
in one word:
RSYNC
in several words:
i'm still waiting for a better backup too..., fast, flexible, multiplatform, incremental, network capable, etc
the only problem is when isnt on the HD yet (ie: windows), but is solved by a copy in the network
Higuita
Seagate buys Maxtor for $1.98 ?
If you had a bad experience with a certain brand or personally know someone who has had problems, you are most likely going to avoid that brand for a long time.
I had stopped using Western Digitals after I had a clicking problem (and subsequent failure) on two of them! It also did not help that the Western Digital hard drives on the Dell workstations in a group I was working with, failed in succession. As a result, I have been buying and recommending Seagate Barracudas which I find are pretty reliable and very quiet.
Maxtor seems to be ok and I am using one of those but they are not as quiet as the Seagates.
What is the advantage, to the general population, to allow stuff like this to happen? What was Segate missing in their product line that they absolutely had to have Maxtor to fill?
It's simply destroying a competitor to allow them to monopolize more of the market.
All this crap happened in the 20's. The US became extremely pro-business and anti-regulation, from the supreme court and president down.
This caused the depression. The depression removed the focus on the rich and corporate entities and returned much of the money they looted from the middle and lower classes, we had quite a few prosperous, happy decades.
Now we get to relearn our lesson I guess. Ready for the next depression? Probably only a decade or so out now?
Remember, we don't charter corporations so the shareholders can become rich and powerfully, that is a side-effect; we allow it because it's supposed to help everyone. When it stops helping the general economy and starts simply being self-serving, we need to re-evaluate the system and tweak it a little.
Fujitsu still makes hard drives, but only Ultra 320 SCSI drives. We use them at work becuase they are nice drives and are at lower price-point compared to other SCSI HDD vendors.
Fujitsu only did away with their consumer level drive unit.
"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." - Carl Sagan
I also had a Seagate Barracuda drive fry on me after only using it for 7 months. I purchased it for the performance factor and I'm pretty sure heat is what killed it. Now anytime I run more that one HD in a case I make sure I buy HD coolers to go with them.
Sounds like you have come to a sound conclusion. The junk you have collected is just that junk. But it is "junk" because to __collected__ it. It was not ever really of value. But what if you had __created__ it. Let's say you are a photographer and dumb enough to keep all your work on one disk drive, 10 years worth of work. Or let's make it worse. Let's say you are running a bussenis and all you customer data, inventory and pending orders are of the disk? My point is that some people do have valuable and irreplaceable data even if many people have only "junk". If you spend much of your time writing, drawing, shotting video an editing then your data has value but if you are simply making a local copy of data you find on the Internet it diferent. I can put a $$ value on my data easy. I spend maybe 2,000 hours a year writing and the company I work for spends about $120/hour to keep me here (no I don't get that much, they need to pay rent, for power and to keep the reastrooms) clean. So by definition I create about $240K worth of data per year, figure that there are about 2,000 people like me that work here.... The cost of the pysical media or drives is trivial THe rule is (or should be) that if you care about data it needs to exist in at least three places so that when one copy dies you still have some redundent storage. No matter how you store it, it wil eventually become unreadable. 100 years from now my kids grandchildren might want to see some old photos of when thier grandparents where 12 years old. THose photos are all digial now. In a few years only a few fine arts photographers and hobbiest will use film.
What are your thoughts on utilizing the SMART functionality on most drives nowadays to determine when they're close to failing? I have an app currently in my systray that shows the current SMART variables for each drive (RPM speed deltas, etc.) in order to tell if a drive is about to fail.
You are only popular on the Internet.
1.9 billion seems like a lot of money.
But the price per Gigabyte is actually very affordable.
It also looks like Maxtor really underperformed its peers. P/E of (roughly) of 8 compared to an industry average of (roughly) 14.5. Revenue seems to be roughly the same as Western Digital: $3.95B for Maxtor vs $3.83B for WDC. BUT Maxtor has a much lower EBITDA: $130MM vs $395MM. Operating margins at Maxtor were also pretty bad (-0.67%).
Seagate is much bigger than Maxtor, with almost $10B in revenue, a 34% quarterly growth, and a 11.5 Operating Margin. From the outside, it looks far more healthy. I wonder how much of the acquisition will be written off as Goodwill???
My bet is that Seagate saw an opportunity to purchase market share on the cheap and could care less about the technology etc. within Maxtor. If anything, it'll bring down the operating margins in the short term for the combined company to below Seagate's current margins.
One of the biggest reasons i swore off Maxtor for the last two years was a new policy in their RMA dept that says they WILLNOT accept an HD for return unless you run Maxblast software which analyzes the drive and returns a code to repeat to them over the phone. I had a bad drive that i couldnt return for six months because i couldnt run the software? Why...? Well it only runs on a 3.5" floppy. If you dont have that installed on your computer the software wont work, no ability to use a flash drive, burned cd, etc. I personally have not had a floppy drive in my computer for over three years. All the ones i had didnt work. And i wasnt going to go out and buy one just for a replace hard drive. I would rather just never buy from Maxtor again.
There was a time when their warranty service impressed me, but requiring the software code killed it for me. BTW- the code was something really stupid like BADDRIVE or something. Go figure.
Western Digital till the end for me now...
...and it should be known by now
My anecdotal evidence is that Western Digital is much more reliable at paying rebates than Seagate.
I have more than once had a rebate on a Seagate hard drive rejected for no evidently legitimate cause, never from Western Digital.
I have purchased a handful of each over the last 5 years.
I'm certainly not likely to buy more Seagate drives with rebates, I may avoid the company altogether.
I also have to add my two cents about my experience with hard drives. Currently, I am attempting to replace all of the Maxtors that I have bought over the years (due to the rebate offers which made them have the best price per gig) because each one of them is starting to get bad sectors (which has made me lose some valuable data). I have never had any problems with Western Digital drives, but Seagate is simply having the best price offers today.
I have to also add my two cents about the "addiction" of wanting to secure data. I used to be devastated when I'd lose data (well this was when my drives would be filled with pRon, music, and movies). But about half a year ago, I realized that I only have about two gigs worth of data that I would never want to lose: Pictures of my priceless trips to places and family and the writing I have done for school as well as pleasure. So, in conclusion, I think that people should as themselves (as has already been asked): Do you really need all of the data that you attempt to secure?
Back in the late 80s, Seagate had a big problem with stiction. I think the 238s were one of the drrives in question. The size is right and the name sounds familiar... it might have even been the 'poster child' drive for the problem.
Drives are supposed to have a thin layer of lubricant. I was told (this part is anecdotal) that the machines they used to detect the lubrication, which was hand-applied, could detect too little on a given platter and reject it, but not too much. So the workers, fearing termination from a high reject rate, would put too much on the drives. (It was described to me as a manual wiping process... this WAS twenty years ago, but were they still manual even then??). So you ended up with drives with a layer of lube that was several times too thick.
Well, out of the box, that wasn't really a problem. But drives spin, and there's this thing called centripetal force, see.... over time, the excess lube would drift to the outside of the drive. This just happened to be the parking area for the heads when the drive was shut down. So after about a year, the layer of lube would get thick enough that the heads would settle down into it... it was exactly like a drop of water between two mirrors. Drive, she spin down, she no spin back up. The warranty was exactly a year, and most drives failed at about 13 months... and Seagate adamantly refused to replace the drives. So a lot of us poor people ended up doing the 'whack the drive on startup' thing.... a good sharp rap right when you powered it up would often unstick the drive, and you'd be able to use it normally. I don't know if the lube on the drive head decreased reliability... most folks replaced theirs as soon as they could.
This badly damaged Seagate's reputation; in fact, I haven't bought a Seagate drive since. Fortunately for them, I suppose, the market at the time was very small. Even if every single person who owned a computer at the time rejected Seagate, that's, what, maybe a 1% market share loss these days? And I've finally, after 15 years, put them back on my 'allowed purchase' category. I prefer WD myself, but I'd buy Seagate in a pinch.
I don't think any manufacturer would get away with a mistake that bad these days.... if they blew it that badly and refused to fix the drives, the resulting furor would put them out of business in short order.
I am personally in charge of near a thousand computers on our network. The worst luck I have is with maxtors by far. We had a series of external drives that burned themselves out after a short period, with a light load.
External drives? I don't suppose you were trying to put high-capacity 7200rpm drives (or any drives that run on the hot side) into external enclosure? If that's the case, it's no wonder they "burned out". You can't just put any random drive into a small enclosure such as a USB case or drive silencer.
This is exactly why, as one AC put it, anecdotalism doesn't fly in hard drive vendor comparisons.
Is this binary or base 10? ;)
Training of workers, and many other "synergies" that one can't appreciate because one does not see the big picture.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Someone should start a project, where they accept old media from strangers, and they recover and restore old tapes and floppies full of stuff, and all Word Processor Documents will be released under a Creative Commons license for the world to browse and use as needed. Countless poems, photos, and essays that might otherwise be lost, could then be saved.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
SEXTOR! :-)
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
If I were Maxtor I would include a disclaimer about 1 Billion being defined as 2^30 Dollars. Should be able to squeeze 140 Mil out of Seagate.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
But every Maxtor drive I have had over the last ten years (4) has suffered major problems. 2 of them had head crashes within six months - losing everything. But some people love them - so go figure!
In 1970, could anyone have said that in the year 2006 there would be a worldwide network where anyone could place any data as long as they paid their internet bill? Could anyone have known that in 2006 the concept of "storage media" such as cassettes would quickly be becoming a quaint memory as it's more convenient for devices to have their own massive internal storage?
The future of technology is too unpredictable. Anyone trying to deduce it is doomed to fail.
It's been a long time.
There's no such thing as an Atari 1200, dumbass.
About three weeks ago, one of my professors asked us who regularly backed up their data. About four of us raised our hands.
The professor then asked who had lost a drive's worth of data, the same four hands went up.
There's nothing wrong with being paranoid about backing up your data. All it takes is one catastrophic loss.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Personally I see this as a bad Idea... I like seagate drives and I like maxtor drives... BUT
I had a maxtor drive fail on me after 2 months. Taking the drive out I examined it and peeled the maxtor label off it. Under it was some other brandname... Quantum, with a crap drive I would never buy being sold with the maxtor name. Since then I have always bought only seagate or WD Caviars. (Actually every PC in this room barring my laptop has a WD drive...)
Now I will steer clear of Seagate. Call me crazy but I dont want to peel off a seagate sticker to find a maxtor sticker covering a quantum sticker.
So... if they merge, will the new company go by the abbreviation "S&M"? (try getting your rebate *now*... go on, beg for it ;)
On some level you are correct. But there definitely is such a thing as an Atari 1200XL, which is what I meant.
Reread your own post:
This merger isn't about making more profits -- it is about cutting the bleeding that has occured now
Since the only way to stop the bleeding is to make more profit, the merger IS about making more profit. That was my only point. My views on profits and their evilness aren't at issue in this thread.
I own a small business that builds custom desktop computer systems for home and business use. And I have had excellent success with Seagate (Love the 5 year warranty) and newer WD I wouldn't touch them for years but now I even have one in my own computer. Maxtors Suck I Have made alot of money replacing conked Maxtors with Seagates. One small business I contracted for had bought 4 machines for $1200.00 each before they hired me and after all four of the maxtors hard drives that came in the sucky dells failed they decided that mabe they should have had me build them custom computers in the first place.