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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)."
When will Seagate and WD merge now?
buying out toshiba's HDD division would not be too difficult for them
I've actually been a fan of my Samsung hard drives. So far they've outlasted every other drive manufacturer I've tried. Now I know that technically they all usually have roughly similar failure rates, but at least from personal experience right about every Samsung product of any kind I've bought I've always gotten great service on and great reliability from, something important for me with hard drives.
Seagate? Not so much. Well, guess it doesn't matter now as like it or not that's who we're getting. Still, I can't imagine a shrinking consumer drive market is very good for the consumer.
"Just a fox, a whisper."
"In addition, the agreement will expand the strategic relationship between the two companies, as Samsung will be providing Seagate with a NAND flash memory for its solid state drives, solid state hybrid drives and other products.
Meanwhile, Seagate will supply disk drives to Samsung for PCs, notebooks and consumer electronics. "
That seems more interesting to me. With more exclusive partnerships and more efficient organization, maybe we'll see costs come down on some of their notebooks/ssd's.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Nobody expects a Seagate acquisition!
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
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.
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.
Almost every HD manufacturer has had their ups and downs with their product with regards to relibility but Samsung have always seemed to me to be one of the better ones; even if their performance doesn't quite match their competitors. Seagate went to shit after they acquired Maxtor so I'm hoping that Samsung will rub off on Seagate and not the other way 'round.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
This is not funny.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
This goes to show that Samsung could quite possibly have just reached milestones in their flash memory production, which is why they are willing to let go of their HD unit.
Well that blows. Samsung drives were great for reliability while still running cool and quiet. Somehow I doubt Seagate will up their quality with the Samsung tech.
On a side note, I remember when Seagate drives were top notch. What happened to them? With Samsung out of the picture and the alternatives being WD and Hitachi, I guess they are at the top again...
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
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
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
Whatever happened to Quantum? Reason I ask is I recently did a data recovery off an old Quantum 40 Gb drive. Drive came from a Gateway desktop that had an Intel CPU and RAMBUS RAM.
"It's one thing to talk about the poetry of machines. Quite another to listen to it for yourself."
after the mail in rebate ?
"It's one thing to talk about the poetry of machines. Quite another to listen to it for yourself."
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.
All our Seagate Barracudas are made in Thailand. The failure rate for the >1tb has been below norm (none), and for 1tb, about average (occasional). Darn good iron, if that's your thing.
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
Summary says there are 4 HDD companies left. Who are the 4? I can think of Seagate, WD, Toshiba.....
$1.375 billion or $990 million formatted.
They're separate manufacturers. They all have similar technology, but they're most certainly not manufactured in the same plant and just shipped around.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Let's roll back the clock a bit
Maxtor (which made terrible drives) bought Quantum (which made good drives)
Seagate (which also makes terrible drives) bought Maxtor (which made better drives than pre-Quantum maxtor)
Seagate then starts making less terrible drives, and buys Samsung (which makes passable drives)
So the end result is we've had a consolidation of drive manufacturers which make low-end drives. Maybe that will squeeze some of the low-priced-low-reliability drives out of the market since they're no longer competing.
I'm not suggesting that segate and samsung intentionally make bad drives, but rather the drives they sell in the low-priced segment tend to be the loudest, slowest, least reliable drives I've ever had to deal with. One drive in my system right now, the error counter in the S.M.A.R.T system is incrementing by the thousands, where as the WD drives aren't incrementing at all. The drive seems to work, and isn't reporting that it's going to fail, but this just doesn't seem right.
Yes I see the inevitability of drives with moving parts disappearing, but not until a fundamental change in OS design happens. /var/run , /tmp and maybe the swap partition. Low-end drives would omit the BBU and have smaller/slower RAM, so that accidental power loss would just wipe the pagefile/temporary storage, and tout it as a security feature.
1) No more swap files. This is the largest reason why we can't move to SSD's, because computers don't yet come with enough RAM, and OS's like Windows and Linux throw data into the swap file continuously. FreeBSD on the other hand you can have an uptime of 2 years and never consume any pagefile out of the box. They keyword here is "out of the box."
2) No more temporary files. How I see this working is that future "high end" SSD drives come with two partitions, a large writeable partition that is directly writeable, and a smaller RAM based copy-on-write partition that only commits changes to the NAND upon shutdown or power loss. In *nix'isms this would be the
3) Changes in filesystem design to support wear leveling. None of the current file systems are any good at this, particularly with journaling. The best I could see happening is that all the OS manufacturers agree to support a single file system standard for NAND devices, unfortunately that's probably not what's going to happen. The problem with current file system's is the need to change so many bits uselessly (eg Access time and Modify time) while doing absolutely nothing to the file. Every time you "Search" for a file you end up wearing down every file on the hard drive. This has got to stop. As with #2, file modification/access time's need to be stored in a RAM section of the drive and written only when shutting down.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
I've had both good and bad luck with BOTH Seagate and WD. I am currently using a Seagate Momentus in thinkpad and it works fine (except for the fact that the thinkpad bios checks for an IBM watermark and won't directly boot anything BUT a drive with IBM firmware, there is a work around for this that involves two keystrokes during powerup but that's another story). I had a WD go bad on me (it failed gradually enough to give me time to save my data) and I had a Seagate 3.5" model fail due to a firmware bug. Seagate did repair this on their nickel.
Not just bonuses. When companies merge there is an excess of executive managers who will get nice golden parachutes, and to avoid making being fired looked good, the managers that stay gets even bigger cash-prizes for not quiting. The negotiation for how to translate stocks in the merger is also a good opportunity for executive managers to get awarded a nice percentage of the new company (if they don't already have one). All in all this makes merging the most profitable move possible for any CEO. The effects it has on the rest of company are less clear-cut.
I have refused to buy Seagate since I became uncomfortable with their apparent lack-to-slow response to their user forum about reports of HDD bricking. Granted, there were several manufacturing sites and firmware versions about. Quality control issues AFAICT. I own one of the affected drives (I *think* so, since there are conflicting reports) but am afraid of using it for anything critical. Since then I've needed to buy ~10 TB in HDD -- all Samsung drives in fact, and they have given me zero problems thus far. In the past, I've not had problems with WD, but that was back in the day with 80 GB IDE HDD. Anyway, I fear what market consolidation will bring.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
In general you need at least 7 players to have sufficient competition. The industries often claim they need to scale large to be efficient, but with a few exceptions, this is a bogus claim.
On the flip side, sucky hard-drives will likely trigger advances in solid-state drives (which I hope also don't oligopolate on us too).
Table-ized A.I.
Does anyone here know what is actually causing the clicking? Thrown head? Bad board on the drive? Miniscule error on track 0 of the disk? I know of a person who had the click of death on their hard drive and sent it in for data recovery. It took about a week but the recovery company was able to recover 99% of the data (I don't know why 1% was missing, perhaps just junk files that didn't matter, but all the documents were there). Cost was about $1800.00 for the 200Gb worth of data.
now what would people rant about on the deal sites
Nothing beats vigilance.
Run checks on the disks on a frequent and ongoing basis and dump them when they look like they are about to die.
You will flee from some brand to another and one day be bit in the arse when that next brand has it's next "moment in the limelight".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Losing two major players in a five firm industry is usually a bad thing with respect to competition / antitrust.
However, in this case it's not that bad - the recent entrance of additional companies (such as Intel) making SSDs will, over time, mitigate the effects.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Noooooooooooooo! :-(
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Can someone that manages enterprise storage comment on this? Not counting the initial investment in $/GB since that should improve with time, do SSD's make the most sense in all applications? What about a disk that is used to store a lot of very small files (less than the SSD block size) that are regularly modified? I guess what I'm asking is: is there a hypothetical enterprise application where the expected lifespan of a HDD is better than an SSD?
My gut tells me that EOL for rotational media is a lot further out than three to four years, but I'm not familiar enough with enterprise storage applications to back up this belief. Otherwise, I don't understand why the traditional "big iron" HDD manufacturers are spending all this cash to consolidate if the required manufacturing capacity to satisfy the HDD market is going to monotonically decrease over the next three to four years. It's not as though that manufacturing expertise translates very well into making a profit on SSD's where the most important components are designed and manufactured by someone else. That's going to be a tough market to be in.
Buggywhips.
I've had three Seagates crash on me (note to self: stop buying OEMs from NewEgg!) so I switched to WD only to have one crash within the year (thankfully still under warranty).
Hard drive quality is seemingly worse - either 1 TB is just too damn big to be reliable or they've all given up trying as they see their SSD doom on the horizon.
Are you sure. Seagate is ahead of you. Four of my drives (no longer in use) were Seagate (or Maxtor brand, but post Seagate takeover and afflicted by the Seagate issues). They ranged from 500MB to 750MB. They have a firmware bug (that Seagate never admitted to) that if the internal drive logging, which is a circular buffer, happens to be full when the drive is powered on... tough luck, it will not work unless/until someone connects to the drive's serial port and clears it.
Nothing wrong with the media, nothing wrong with the file system. Nothing for anything to detect. Effectively randomly on a power up it will simply and permanently (barring obtaining special equipment or paying Seagate) die.
Not only did Seagate never acknowledge the issue, they provided firmware updates that bricked some drives. And silently replaced the bad firmware update with a new one having the same revision number. The original and subsequent updated firmware having the same revision number, and never a comment from Seagate about it being a problem, had different hashes. Given the silent replacement with a different firmware it is clear that Seagate was aware of the firmware being a problem for some drives but never admitted it and those unfortunate enough to be bit by it were out of luck -- Seagate's policy is uniformly "your fault if you update the firmware and anything goes wrong."
I was never foolish enough to attempt flashing my drives. I didn't (and still don't) have enough excess capacity to pull the data off of them so they sit powered off waiting for such time. And I'm hoping that they power up fine. They probably will (per boot up the risk is fairly low), but is definitely not guaranteed.
I can't be bothered to provide a google link to the issue, but it was all over Seagate's forums and was mentioned on slashdot. The explanation, by the way, was provided anonymously by someone claiming to be a Seagate engineer. So it may not be true, but it very much fit the seemingly random nature of the failure and the method of fixing the drives (which some individuals did do) worked.
If you value your data do not use Seagate.
Youngsters. Once upon a year, Seagate was well known for selling dodgy drives, but they cleaned up their act and built up a reputation. So, did Maxtor's suckiness follow Seagate? Or did Seagate simply revert?
Yes, in the last five years, Samsung have been the drive of choice for the discerning gentleman. Now? I don't know where to turn.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Are they expecting the average quality to go up?
Perhaps they are. I used to be a Seagate only guy before they went down the toilet with that whole firmware fiasco. Been buying Samsung and WD ever since. I guess I'll have to grab a few more Samsungs before Seagate starts screwing them up too.
They have a firmware bug (that Seagate never admitted to) that if the internal drive logging, which is a circular buffer, happens to be full when the drive is powered on... tough luck, it will not work unless/until someone connects to the drive's serial port and clears it.
Nothing wrong with the media, nothing wrong with the file system. Nothing for anything to detect. Effectively randomly on a power up it will simply and permanently (barring obtaining special equipment or paying Seagate) die.
Not only did Seagate never acknowledge the issue, they provided firmware updates that bricked some drives.
Never acknowledged or admitted? I followed that story and the entire reason you know the bug had something to do with internal logging is that Seagate ultimately not only acknowledged the bug, they described the failure mechanism. (Also, it wasn't triggered by being full, it was triggered by being at a multiple of 320 (or some such weird number) entries long at powerup. Basically every time you powered down the drive you were spinning the roulette wheel.)
Yeah, they flubbed a lot of things related to letting customers know what was going on at first, how they issued firmware updates, and so forth. The saga was a great case study in how not to handle critical firmware bugfixes. Seagate learned a hard lesson about how to communicate with customers about problems and issue firmware updates to them. Much of the way they compounded the problem was due to panic-rushing out new firmware images delivered inside updater programs which were never designed to be safe for the general public to use. But it's a bit strange that you're insisting up and down that they never so much as acknowledged the bug, when they clearly did.
Also, you didn't have to pay Seagate. Pretty sure I remember them offering to fix any firmware-'bricked' drive for you, for free, without data loss barring real damage to the drive. Actually if they had tried to make you pay for this service they'd have been sued into the stone age, as all the drives in question were by definition still under warranty (it was a fairly new product family and I don't think any of them could have been out of warranty yet).
We operate hundreds of Seagate drives and our annual failure rate is rather low. WD drives are giving grief tho dropping constantly out of RAID etc.
Almost every seagate drive that fails is years old already, and been in 24/7 usage in a server.
Hell, i even got some seagates getting quite an abuse on RAID, and still no failures despite they get occasionally kicked, are stacked on top of each other with only mounting being the cabling etc. Tho i am expecting them to fail at ANYTIME, they are getting that bad of an abuse.
I would suspect your usage pattern is causing some major abuse to the drives, operating near magnetic sources? Vibration? Do not have external drives on your desk, as it's going to have multiple types of vibration (speakers, typing on keyboard etc.). Or maybe you just keep dropping them while they are running?
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