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Samsung HD Unit Bought By Seagate
nanoflower followed up on a recent story about the unpredictable future of data storage. That story talked about Western Digital buying Hitachi, leaving just 4 players. Now:
"Yet another hard drive company is going by the wayside, as Seagate is buying the Samsung HDD unit. Seagate is buying the unit for $1.375 billion (half in stock, half in cash)."
Back in 2008, Seagate was already fitting its FreeAgent Go 500GB USB HDD with Samsung hard drives: http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardware-components-aftermarket-upgrades/301553-seagate-freeagent-go-500gb-disassembly-samsung-hd-upgrade-laptop.html
Not just Linux! I've had 50% failure rate (3 of 6 over the last 18 months) on Seagate 3.5" 1tb drives in a RAID enclosure connected to my Mac. I'll also note the continuing problems with the Momentus XT 2.5" hybrid drives; apparently the drive is optimized for Windows and works poorly at best (or fails more frequently) under Linux or Mac OS X. And Seagate's firmware update is basically a Windows solution that requires lots of extra effort to work on any other OS.
Remember when Seagate bought Maxtor in 2006? You are really having trouble with Maxtor drives that are now branded Seagate. I'm going to guess you bought the less expensive ones. Before Maxtor and Seagate merged, I had about 12 drives in machines in my house. 5 of them were Maxtor and all of those failed within 18 months. Some of the others are still going. (Original Seagate and WD drives). Unfortunately it is hard to know if you are going to get the "good" or the "bad" Seagate drives now.
Hitachi GST is in the process of being acquired by WD, so if in the mean time Seagate is acquiring Samsung's HDD lines, then we've seen the amount of choice shrink greatly in only a few months.