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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.
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
Is that like, $1.9 x 10^9 or $1.9 x 2^30?
OK, my idiocy. Replace "WD" with "Maxtor" in the previous post.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
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...
The purchase price was $2.9B with a $1B mail in rebate.
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.
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!
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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