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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)."
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.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Oh god, please no. I have had nothing but horrible experiences with Seagate drives recently under linux:
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.
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.
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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