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."

Comments

Hard Drive Voodoo?

[eldavojohn]

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?

Re:Hard Drive Voodoo?

[Belisarivs]

That really isn't fair to Western Digital. A few years ago, when all the IDE manufacturers were reducing their warranty period to one year for consumer drives, it was Western Digital that came out with their "Special Edition" drives, all of which came with three-year warranties. These drives ran like a champ. Since then they have dropped the "Special Edition" label, and almost all of their high-end drives come with a three-year warranty.

Back in those days, I bought 4 Maxtor drives, and all of them have failed (One of the main reasons for my move to Western Digital). As it's been said in other posts, anecdotal evidence really isn't much of an indicator for hard drives. I think most of the HD community simply put out crap back around 2002, but have since upped the quality.

All your bits are belong to us

[digitaldc]

So this will mean cheaper HDD prices? Or are we to expect more expensive or stagnant pricing due to the elimination of competition?

casualty

[Lxy]

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.

For those keeping score...

[Stavr0]

2000 - Maxtor buys Quantum's hard drive division
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.

Re:What happened to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act

[10Ghz]

Well, we currently have Seagate/Maxtor, Western Digital, Hitachi and Samsung. Toshiba makes notebook HD's, while Fujitsu makes SCSI and other hi-end HD's. I think there's still plenty of competition going on

is it me?

[utexaspunk]

...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...

re: all hard drives die

[King_TJ]

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.

Re:Seagate warranty

[Jepah]

I used to work for a company making Desktops for home users, 5 years ago. At the time we would probably get around 30 faulty drives a month returned. Of these the huge majority were maxtor. We would get the occasional Seagate and IBM. This is pretty anecdotal considering they were only in sub $2k machines, but we started avoiding Maxtor drives which didn't have a long warranty.

Oh and the WD drives I have bought recently have all had 5 year warranties.