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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

#61

Post by derobert »

pyre wrote: post #50
nextparadigms wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where exactly do you think data 'in the cloud' is actually stored?

Given, this may well require fewer hard drives (due to better capacity utilization), but still requires hard drives.

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

#62

Post by chalst »

wmf wrote: post #60
chalst wrote: post #25

"Most of the world’s disk drives are not able to be built because Thailand is underwater” Consolidation when supply is depressed is anticompetitive.

This deal was decided months ago, as was the WD/HGST acquisition.

It's not clear to me where you're going with that observation.

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

#63

Post by wazoox »

pasbesoin wrote: post #41
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…

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 doub…

There were several interesting studies these past years : one from google, one from NetApp, an older one from the CERN:

Google 2007: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub32774.html

Carnegie Mellon 2005: http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder.html

CERN on data integrity: http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?contribId=3&sess...

NetApp 2010: http://synergy-ds.com/netapp/wp-7005.pdf

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

#64

Post by pasbesoin »

wazoox wrote: post #63
pasbesoin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 doub…

There were several interesting studies these past years : one from google, one from NetApp, an older one from the CERN: Google 2007: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub32774.html Carnegie Mellon 2005: http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder.html CERN on data integrity: http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?contribId=3&sess... NetApp 2010: http://synergy-ds.com/netapp/wp-7005.pdf

I may be remembering the Google study and/or something else from about that time frame. I have a vague recollection now of both Google's opinion and and something else that had at least some degree of separation from Google.

Thanks very much for the informative response. I'll have a look at these (as soon as I talk myself down sufficiently from my guilt over my price-motivated Seagate purchase ;-).

In part, I also pushed the button on Seagate (despite the 1 TB "click of death" episode from a few years ago) because a recent WD laptop HD purchase went rather bad with incessant parking that is apparently inherent to the model's firmware. I finally fixed that on the XP Pro machine it lives in by finding and setting to run on start-up:

http://sites.google.com/site/quiethdd/ [1]

But not before SMART reported significant aging for the drive. Which rather pissed me off. (I should pull it and RMA it -- 5 year warranty.)

So, that helped lead me to Hitachi. Then the price inflation, plus the news that WD is buying Hitachi, and I figured I'd give Seagate another go.

I hate purchasing consumer electronics, these days.

--

1. Which I found at about the same time I learned I could tweak the relevant settings manually -- so, I went with the pre-packaged implementation.

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

#65

Post by thebigshane »

kephra wrote: post #57

Thats bad, because the Samsung discs had a much better quality than Seagate or Western Digital. We now have a monopoly of two low quality discs.

Duopoly.

Incredibly interesting list of existing duopolies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duopoly#Examples_in_business

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

#66

Post by wmf »

chalst wrote: post #62
wmf wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This deal was decided months ago, as was the WD/HGST acquisition.

It's not clear to me where you're going with that observation.

Should they cancel an acquisition because of a temporary manufacturing problem? IMO the flooding shouldn't affect our thinking about whether these deal are competitive or anticompetitive.

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

#67

Post by kirpekar »

wazoox wrote: post #46
kirpekar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, only if the WD HGST merger goes through.

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

EU approval is only conditional. US SEC and China are still pending. Cannot comment on the chances of it going through.

I work at HGST.

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

#68

Post by jlarocco »

sunchild wrote: post #55
jlarocco wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. It's an opt-in system. If somebody is more concerned with something else there's nobody forcing them to focus on making money.

Actually, it's not purely opt-in. Remember when our tax money "rescued" the banks because of their reckless lending/investments less than two years ago?

Ouch. Valid point.

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

#69

Post by chalst »

wmf wrote: post #66
chalst wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear to me where you're going with that observation.

Should they cancel an acquisition because of a temporary manufacturing problem? IMO the flooding shouldn't affect our thinking about whether these deal are competitive or anticompetitive.

When there are few suppliers, depressed demand makes it easy for oligopolists to behave like monopolists.

Should they cancel the deal? Certainly their shareholders wouldn't like them to do it out of the kindness of their hearts. I do think that competition watchdogs should be looking at HD mfers very closely now.

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

#70

Post by mmetzger »

smackfu wrote: post #52
jseliger wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Further problems with the hard drive market: 1) SSDs are taking over the market, and that favors flash suppliers like Samsung. 2) All the research dollars to increase sizes just drive the prices down. 3) At some point soon, there will be no need for further drive size increases. Unless someone comes up with a more space-hungry format than 1080p video.

In reference to #3, there are 2k and 4k video formats that will likely make the jump to consumer level soon. Saw an 80" LCD TV the other day that looked pixellated - higher res would help.
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