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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."
OK, my idiocy. Replace "WD" with "Maxtor" in the previous post.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
I guess this is a good time to bring up the storagereview reliability database. It's the only third party tracking of HDD reliability that I am aware of. Whenever I buy a new HDD or have one die or taken out of service I go to storagereview and update my profile. Other people may not be so reliable, and people with problems are probably more likely to report then happy customers, but it WILL give you a good idea model vs model of the reliability of a drive.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Then Seagate wins, their drives have a 5 year warranty, everybody else only offers 3 years max, some as little as 1 year.
I am sold on Western Digital, 5 year contract, excellent drives, got a 10K raptor at home myself. Low failure rate in our enterprise environment. Cant vouch for seagate though, havent had too much exposure to them other than the dirt cheap 300GB I bought that was DOA.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
SATA is just fine. It's almost as fast as SCSI and as far as the seagate barracuda drives go, the SATA disk is identical (well 7200 rpm anyway) to the SCSI disk, except it is cheaper. The rub is the RAID controller though. A good SATA raid controller is every bit as reliable as a SCSI RAID controller. A crappy SATA RAID controller (aka Dell CERC) will sour your experience with SATA. Our Apple Xserve RAID is all ATA (PATA even, although the new one is SATA) and it has proven to be extremely reliable.
Does anyone else here remember when 80MB drives were high end and 120MB drives were pretty much king of the hill? 40GB was the de-facto standard desktop computer size.
Well around that time (1991? 1992?) Seagate produced a huge run of bad 40GB drives and earned a bad rep for themselves that it took YEARS for them to shake off. If anyone on usenet or a BBS were to mention buying a Seagate drive, it'd be followed by about 30 posts claiming that Seagate sucks, "I had a 40MB seagate and it died" and so forth. Western Digital was the name to trust then.
In recent years, IBM Deskstars became known for enterprise-level performance on the desktop, and they had many, many great high-performance destkop drives. However they had a bad run of (60GB?) hard drives, and suddenly everyone was flaming IBM "Deathstar" drives across the board. Never mind that it was one specific batch of one specific model drive that was bad. Suddenly all IBM drives were bad.
In my personal experience (in reference to optical drives but hear me out) I had a bad experience with a Ricoh CD-RW drive - $800 at the time. I had the drive fail within the first month, sent it to Ricoh, got the same drive back, and it failed within a month again. Sent it back, received it. This happened SIX times during the warranty period. In the meantime news broke out on Usenet about a bad run of those drives (which were considered high end at the time) The last two times I sent the drive in I called them (Ricoh) beforehand to beg them to exchange the drive, or repair the specific issue. Each time I received the drive back and it died within weeks. During the warranty period the drive was in Ricoh's possession more than mine. After the warranty was out I disassembled the drive (CD-RW drives were still in the $500-$600 range by then), took apart the optical sled, cleaned it with isopropyl and lubricated it with white grease. The drive worked flawlessly from that point on. The problem was simple: Ricoh chose a poor lubrication (consistency was similar to petroleum jelly) which picked up every single piece of dust that entered the drive, and turned into a glue-like consistency, restricting the optical sled from moving smoothly, so it could no longer seek to follow the track consistently. Because of Ricoh's lousy customer service and their refusal to address the issue properly, I have never bought a Ricoh product again and never will.
(back on topic, you'll see why I mentioned the Ricoh issue in a moment)
I've had Western Digital drives fail. However each time WDC customer service has handled the issue with no questions asked, and in each case cross-shipped a new (or refurb) drive, and every time I've received a drive back it's lasted for many years. Because their customer service has been solid, I still buy WDC products, but ONLY the products with a three-year warranty or better.
I am partial to Seagate though and that's all I will ship to customers in desktop computers or servers when I can help it. With their 5-year warranty on all drives in all channels, you know they're confident in the product and are willing to back it. I just hope with their assimilating Maxtor that Maxtor's quality increases, as opposed to cheapening the WDC line.
I fail to understand why Seagate would want Maxtor though, except possibly to gain more factory space and maybe a couple of patents. Seagate's products are vastly superior, especially in terms of quality. Maybe it's Maxtor's external drive products they're after? It certainly can't be product quality/reliability.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50