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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."
There aren't many big players in the hard disk market.
I'm not that enthusisatic about loosing one of them.
Anecdotal evidence won't get you far in the hard drive world. You haven't mentioned WD, whose Caviar line is in most of my machines. But I digress.
A good measure of the hard drive reliability is the warranty that the manufacturer is attaching to it. While there _will_ be failures before the warrarnty expires, it gives an indication as to how much you can trust the drive.
I wouldn't expect any further consolidation in the hard drive business to result in more price competition. There are only a very small number of manufacturers as it is. I suspect that hard drive prices have more or less bottomed out now in the "bargain" segment of the industry and that with current limits on areal density of data on the platters that any differentiation in prices will be based on performance rather than capacity.
One can only hope that someone comes up with some paradigm shift in storage (either in price or capacity) that puts real pressure on the hard disk manufacturers to innovate and remain competitive.
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Has the Sherman Anti-Trust Act been repealed, or am I missing something here?
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.
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.
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?
At work, we only buy Seagate SCSI and ATA drives. We've returned RAID arrays to Dell because they failed to provide us with the proper drives (they just love to slip WDs in there). This is another bit of anecdotal evidence, but I've never seen a Seagate fail here. The few that have failed have been some Fujitsus and the few WDs that come in laptops. We're talking around 300 machines here.
I don't have much experience with Maxtors except the one in my firewall that is still going strong after 7 years.
Mod parent up. It sounds like the grandparent is basing his judgement off of a handfull of hard drives he has personally owned. Statistics off of such a low sample number are very bad. Talk to someone who works at a large corp in is charge of hundreds or thousands of drives. I think you will quickly revise your attitude towards Seagate. There is a reson they have a 5 year warrenty and Maxtor only has a 1 year.
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)
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.
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.
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