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)."

Comments

Re:Merge

[CokoBWare]

God please no.

Re:More interesting...

[PolygamousRanchKid]

With more exclusive partnerships and more efficient organization, maybe we'll see costs come down on some of their notebooks/ssd's.

"Exclusive partnerships" always send up a monopoly warning flag for me. That usually means higher profits for producers, and higher costs for the end user.

Re:Why!?!?!

[Hazel Bergeron]

What is the point of buying out competitors, when their products are not even in the same ballpark of quality?

Because people are paid bonuses, and bonuses are based on short term gains.

This applies to modern capitalism in general.

Re:Merge

[Hero Zzyzzx]

Oh god, please no. I have had nothing but horrible experiences with Seagate drives recently under linux:

• this bug hit me,
• I had at least 4 RMAs on the same drive due to a similar "click of death",
• I had a "click of death" on an iomega external HDD that was actually - you guessed it - seagate inside.

I don't get it. Seagate used to be great - WHY did they engineer drives to not work properly under linux? The idea of an HDD that doesn't work under linux is just wrong - like you have to actually try to make something that crappy.

I ended up just replacing the still under warranty Seagate drives with Western Digitals. Problems since then? Zero. LEAVE WESTERN DIGITAL ALONE!

PS: I must be dumb. Slashdot is not styling my bulletted list properly.

Darn!

[shic]

Seagate and Samsung are my favourite two drive manufacturers at the moment... I'd have preferred they remain separate.

If I'm thinking about my data, I want - above all - for it to be reliably stored. With the best will in the world, eventually every drive fails... So... I tend to buy different makes of drives in pairs - from different suppliers... the logic is that it is far less likely that both drives will fail simultaneously - leaving my raid-1 data intact.

If Seagate and Samsung share manufacturing/storage/distribution, then the independence of Seagate and Samsung drives vanishes... forcing me to go to another less-preferred vendor.

I wonder when these consolidations will stop being a good idea? I definitely hope that it will be possible to buy independently manufactured drives in future.

Re:Darn!

[rolfwind]

I wonder when these consolidations will stop being a good idea?

Long before this. There definitely needs to be more than 3 HDD manufacturers in the world. I wouldn't even consider 7 an especially healthy number.

Unlike the car market, computer component makers aren't especially under pressure from the used market. Almost any used car the last 40+ years goes highway speeds. Other things are a bonus most of the time. Can't say the same with computers - a drive from 5 years ago is beyond suspect in terms of reliability and often just doesn't cut it in terms of speed and capacity. Other than reliability, the same goes with all other components except maybe monitors and cases/psu.

Continually chiseling down manufacturers is not a good thing. Only thing worse is the CPU market but thankfully arm CPUs became viable for more than dumb phones within the last decade. Small comfort if Intel were to kill AMD but at least an alternate route.

Cream rising, Crap sinking

[mauriceh]

Seagate and Samsung HDD merge = Crap gets bigger
WD and Hitachi GST merge = Cream gets better.

I will tell you where this goes:
Seagate goes broke within 18 months

Re:Well crap

[afidel]

Perhaps their low end line is bad *because* they bought Maxtor. Their enterprise line is still just fine, been cruising at ~1.5% AFR here for the last 5 years with ~90% Seagate disks.

Windows as well, Seagate External Drives are bad

[Azarman]

I recently had a 1.5TB External Seagate drive. it worked for a few months then started clicking and within 2 weeks the thing failed. I did some google searching and really REALLY wish i had done more research before buying the drive because it is a very common problem. I even got a replacement and the same thing happened. I have read of someone having 5 replacements in 6 months. Seagate are aware there is a problem as they replace the drive instantly but no public recall.

Google Link to LOTS of web pages details the issues http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Seagate+External+drive+clicking
Seagate Forums
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Other-External-products/Seagate-Expansions-producing-loud-clicking-sound/td-p/30962/page/3
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Maxtor-OneTouch-Products/Maxtor-External-Hard-Drive-Clicking-Noise-Not-Working/td-p/16446
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Other-External-products/Solution-Seagate-Expansion-Desktop-External-Drive-clicking/td-p/49865

I could supply more links, but from a personal view NEVER use seagate for anything but Throw away data. I was using it as a backup for my PC and in the end lost 500gb of data in the process.
Do not by Seagate hard drives