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Samsung Sold its Hard Drive Business to Seagate for $1.4 Billion

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Re: Samsung Sold its Hard Drive Business to Seagate for $1.4 Billion

#41

Post by pasbesoin »

wazoox wrote: post #15
protomyth wrote: post #4

As of late, Seagate drives have been pretty crappy, which is a real shame given their former glory. Maybe this purchase will change something.

Storage professional here. Disk drives failure rate is usually 0.5 to 3% a year. Drives do fail, so you can't draw any statistical significant figures from the failure of a couple of drives among a total of four or five (or even ten or twenty). However my company's selling drives by the thousands, and here's what I can say: Seagate barraccuda are the worst pieces of crap being sold since the infamous IBM 80GB debacle…

Unfortunately, I recently picked up a couple of Barracuda because of a price break fluke that let me essentially escape the flooding price inflation.

I guess I will use them with trepidation (redundant backups, mostly sitting on a shelf) and plan to phase them out in the coming year and/or into transient cache.

Thanks for the heads up.

P.S. I was set to go with Hitachi (2 TB 7200 RPM) when their prices more than doubled on me. Price aside, are they still a good bet like they were a couple of years ago? (I recall reading that at one point Google was favoring them.)

Also, since I'm adding a postscript, does anyone recall the HD failure rate study that someone put out a few years ago? Of course, things change, but behind the particular models in seem to recall some useful inferences about company/brand quality/reliability.

Re: Samsung Sold its Hard Drive Business to Seagate for $1.4 Billion

#42

Post by kirpekar »

wazoox wrote: post #14

WD and Seagate now make 87% of all disk drives. Unsurprisingly, they just slashed warranty on various drives down from 5 to 3 years, and even down to only 1 or 2 years for some models. Oligopoly will suck for us consumers.

True, only if the WD HGST merger goes through.

Re: Samsung Sold its Hard Drive Business to Seagate for $1.4 Billion

#43

Post by jpdoctor »

jitbit wrote: post #17

$1.4 billion, mates. $1.4 billion for a business with manufacturing plants, complicated global logistics... Now let me remind you that Facebook is valued 85 (!) times more.. o_O

> Now let me remind you that Facebook is valued 85 (!) times more.

They aced the swimsuit competition in the Keynesian beauty contest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest#Overvi...

... until the next babe comes along.

Re: Samsung Sold its Hard Drive Business to Seagate for $1.4 Billion

#44

Post by listic »

wazoox wrote: post #15
protomyth wrote: post #4

As of late, Seagate drives have been pretty crappy, which is a real shame given their former glory. Maybe this purchase will change something.

Storage professional here. Disk drives failure rate is usually 0.5 to 3% a year. Drives do fail, so you can't draw any statistical significant figures from the failure of a couple of drives among a total of four or five (or even ten or twenty). However my company's selling drives by the thousands, and here's what I can say: Seagate barraccuda are the worst pieces of crap being sold since the infamous IBM 80GB debacle…

Which Seagate Barracuda models exactly are bad, in your experience? I think we cannot generalize across all models and generations, can we?

Re: Samsung Sold its Hard Drive Business to Seagate for $1.4 Billion

#45

Post by mrb »

adestefan wrote: post #39
microtonal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately, there is more competition in the SSD space. And given that SSD will probably become the norm in laptops and desktops, this shouldn't be a problem for most people.

The SSD market is starting to collapse in on itself as well. Most of the smaller controller manufacturers are starting to be bought by rivals and I'll be amazed if Sandforce makes it until 2013 without being bought. Plus flash chips are already a pretty small market.

Sandforce was already acquired (by LSI in October 2011).

Re: Samsung Sold its Hard Drive Business to Seagate for $1.4 Billion

#46

Post by wazoox »

kirpekar wrote: post #42
wazoox wrote: post #14

WD and Seagate now make 87% of all disk drives. Unsurprisingly, they just slashed warranty on various drives down from 5 to 3 years, and even down to only 1 or 2 years for some models. Oligopoly will suck for us consumers.

True, only if the WD HGST merger goes through.

The UE authorized the merger, AFAIK they're only waiting for the Chinese green light.

Re: Samsung Sold its Hard Drive Business to Seagate for $1.4 Billion

#47

Post by ig1 »

jitbit wrote: post #17

$1.4 billion, mates. $1.4 billion for a business with manufacturing plants, complicated global logistics... Now let me remind you that Facebook is valued 85 (!) times more.. o_O

Facebook is the largest seller of online display advertising in the world (bigger than Google), and they've still got a relatively immature advertising platform.

Re: Samsung Sold its Hard Drive Business to Seagate for $1.4 Billion

#48

Post by wazoox »

listic wrote: post #44
wazoox wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage professional here. Disk drives failure rate is usually 0.5 to 3% a year. Drives do fail, so you can't draw any statistical significant figures from the failure of a couple of drives among a total of four or five (or even ten or twenty). However my company's selling drives by the thousands, and here's what I can say: Seagate barraccuda are the worst pieces of crap being sold since the infamous IBM 80GB debacle…

Which Seagate Barracuda models exactly are bad, in your experience? I think we cannot generalize across all models and generations, can we?

The worst are the 1TB ES2. These are the same as 7200.11 in the consumer series.

Re: Samsung Sold its Hard Drive Business to Seagate for $1.4 Billion

#49

Post by jseliger »

ig1 wrote: post #47
jitbit wrote: post #17

$1.4 billion, mates. $1.4 billion for a business with manufacturing plants, complicated global logistics... Now let me remind you that Facebook is valued 85 (!) times more.. o_O

Facebook is the largest seller of online display advertising in the world (bigger than Google), and they've still got a relatively immature advertising platform.

Hard drives are also commodities, which means they sell near cost. If Samsung charges $10 more, people buy from another maker. Facebook is almost the exact opposite: its userbase means that, right now, there is no homologous replacement (including Google+, because they don't have the users).

Which doesn't mean FB is "worth" what it's worth—to me it seems overvalued, but then again no one is holding a gun to my head and forcing me to buy its stock. The nice thing about markets is that we can bet with our money, or not.

Re: Samsung Sold its Hard Drive Business to Seagate for $1.4 Billion

#50

Post by pyre »

nextparadigms wrote: post #6
ars wrote: post #2

And then there were 4[1]. And soon to be 3[2]. And one of those doesn't make many drives[3]. So we have a duopoly in hard disks. I'm quite surprised regulators allowed this deal. [1] Seagate, WD, Hitachi, Toshiba [2] WD is buying Hitachi [3] Toshiba doesn't make many drives, and only makes 2.5 inch and smaller.

Are they all from the same country? Either way, the PC industry and the related component industry is fading away, so Samsung did the right move here. They probably want to focus more on the mobile markets.

Right. We're entering the post PC era. Pretty soon everything will be done on tablets or 'in the cloud.' Neither of which require hard drives.
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