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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)."
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!
God please no.
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.
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.
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.
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.
$1.375 billion or $990 million formatted.
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
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
And I say "oh God please no" for the opposite reason... horrible luck with WD drives. So I feel "LEAVE SEAGATE ALONE!" Let's just keep them separate and keep everyone happy :-D
So Seagate is like the Broadcom of hard drive manufacturers? Good to know.
In the mid '90s I'd had a lot of WD drives die on me and was kind of turned off of them, but I've slowly been using more since the early 2000s and they've all been very reliable. Now I'm running all WD drives in all of my computers (that have hard drives) and they've been very reliable, I've only had one drive made since 2000 fail, and it was run hard and then left in a box for at least 7 years, and failed when I tried to dump the data off last year (it was the only drive from an old Win98SE gaming machine, I wanted to turn it into a VM...got most of the files back but it failed before it got to the Windows folder so I lost my heavily customized OS, D'oh!!!).
My home server is actually running its OS from an ancient 8GB WD drive that runs very hot but it still works fine. So I guess WD is my go-to hard drive manufacturer now.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Just remembered: Actually that drive that failed was a Maxtor drive. So there you go.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
According to the wikipedia that fourth is TrekStor. Never heard of them myself. And if you're being somewhat more liberal with the term HDD, then there are others which deal exclusively in SSDs, which isn't what you were getting at, but should be imporatant in the future. With the list getting that short of manufacturers it's probably that we'll start to see stagnation. Whereas up until now it seems to mostly just be quality that's been suffering instead of performance and capacity.
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.