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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.
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.
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
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
Is that like, $1.9 x 10^9 or $1.9 x 2^30?
I agree with you. Maxtor has been rock solid for me. Seagate has been a dismal failure. Although my experience with Seagate has been alomst totally on the SCSI side in servers. Very high failure rate. IBM doesn't make drives anymore. Hitachi bought that division out.
I am not left-handed, either!
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.
What brand of hard drive should I choose in future? IBM?
IBM stopped making hard drives after the death star mess, I would reccomend Western Digital if you want to avoid seagate - although I have a seagate in my MythTV box and it works with no problems.
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
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.
Yeah, but that's after the rebate, if it ever arrives.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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?
...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...
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Apple vs Mac vs *NIX/Linux
Sure, Apple hates Mac just like Microsoft would love to fucking kill MSN!
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
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.
Maxtor has been one of those brands that has failed me time and time again: we have 3 main file servers where I work: one of them has 20 active Hitachi drives, another has 16 active Maxtor drives, and the other has 12 Seagate drives (all drives are 250GB). In the last 2 years, we've had 2 Hitachi drives fail, 9 Maxtor drives fail, and no Seagate drives fail. In the case of the Hitachi drives, the RAID setup prevented us from having to restore from backup, with the Maxtors on the other hand, even RAID didn't help us here: we ended up with a couple of days downtime replacing drives and restoring from a backup that was 20 hours out of date (meaning data was lost). These are all SATA drives and are in RAID 5 arrays. Warranty means little if the drives fail a lot; the data and the time are far more valuable than the drive even in small to midsize environments like ours. No company can make a "perfect" drive, but it definitely seems that some are a lot worse than others.
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.
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
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.
Things change. Starting with Seagate drives in IBM PC-ATs that occasionally had to be whacked with something to start them turning; finding Quantum Bigfoot drives were crap after good experiences with their Fireball line; bad experiences with Maxtors up until they came out with the "Diamondmax" line (a long time ago); a period of time when Western Digital drives on the order of 1GB were universally reviled for their dying; good experiences with IBM - but only until the later Deskstars. Recently in servers, our Maxtor drives have, yes, started dying young in excessive numbers, but not young enough to be detected by burn-in. Damnit, we use Raid-10, I shouldn't have to rush out and replace the drive that afternoon because the increased load on the other disk in the failed mirror might kill it too.
Which it seems to come down to - so far the best guide has been the reviews' disk temperature benchmarks. After all is said and done, the cooler ones seem to last *much* longer.