Seagate buys Maxtor for $1.9B

groovy.ambuj writes "Reuters reports that Seagate Technology would buy rival computer disk-drive maker Maxtor Corp. for $1.9 billion. Seagate is already world's largest hard drive manufacturer and Maxtor is the third largest after Seagate and Western Digital."

Hard Drive Voodoo?

[eldavojohn (898314)]

You know, I noticed that between me and my friends the most painful experience when dealing with computers is losing a hard drive.

Yes, I know it's a nerd thing to say but it's almost as bad as losing a pet.

Now, because of the brands of said failed drives, I have developed a quality ranking apart from my friends. And it's the pain of that lost data that backs me up.

I had a death star (IBM deskstar [trilithium.com]) tear itself apart on me and even though it was one of those old Ukrainian IBM/Hitachi ones, I still shy away from Western Digital who now makes them also. I've also had a Seagate fail [wikipedia.org] me but (to be fair) I had bought it thoroughly used.

Now, when ever I go out and buy a drive, I'm leaning towards Maxtor simply because I have a lot of them and one hasn't failed me with crucial data on it. I'm a lot better prepared to deal with that now as I'm older and wiser so maybe I won't ever feel that level of pain again.

Many of my friends swear by Seagate and also claim they're the quietest thing out there.

These new drives made by the merged company should be quite good, perhaps they're able to combine technologies, patents, manufacturing methods and resources to form a very reliable and quiet drive.

What I'd like to ask slashdot readers is for a good way to measure drive quality other than throwing down chicken bones and looking at them or reading tea leaves?

I guess the only thing I've found so far is reviews on-line (sometimes Neweggs have the best sampling), any other suggestions? Is there some kind of hard-drive-consumer-report thingy out there?

Re:Hard Drive Voodoo?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Anecdotal evidence won't get you far in the hard drive world. You haven't mentioned WD, whose Caviar line is in most of my machines. But I digress.

A good measure of the hard drive reliability is the warranty that the manufacturer is attaching to it. While there _will_ be failures before the warrarnty expires, it gives an indication as to how much you can trust the drive.

Re:Hard Drive Voodoo?

[Daemonik (171801)]

A good measure of the hard drive reliability is the warranty that the manufacturer is attaching to it.

Then Seagate wins, their drives have a 5 year warranty, everybody else only offers 3 years max, some as little as 1 year.

Re:Hard Drive Voodoo?

[raddan (519638)]

And Seagate has a 5-year warranty on its Barracuda drives. Samsung has 3 year warranties on some of its drives as well. As far as I am aware, most other manufacturers have 1 year warranties. I think this speaks volumes about these drives, particularly WD drives, every one of which I've ever owned has failed before the warranty was up.

At work, we only buy Seagate SCSI and ATA drives. We've returned RAID arrays to Dell because they failed to provide us with the proper drives (they just love to slip WDs in there). This is another bit of anecdotal evidence, but I've never seen a Seagate fail here. The few that have failed have been some Fujitsus and the few WDs that come in laptops. We're talking around 300 machines here.

I don't have much experience with Maxtors except the one in my firewall that is still going strong after 7 years.

Re:Hard Drive Voodoo?

[Belisarivs (526071)]

That really isn't fair to Western Digital. A few years ago, when all [theinquirer.net] the IDE manufacturers were reducing their warranty period to one year for consumer drives, it was Western Digital that came out with their "Special Edition" drives, all of which came with three-year warranties. These drives ran like a champ. Since then they have dropped the "Special Edition" label, and almost all of their high-end drives come with a three-year warranty.

Back in those days, I bought 4 Maxtor drives, and all of them have failed (One of the main reasons for my move to Western Digital). As it's been said in other posts, anecdotal evidence really isn't much of an indicator for hard drives. I think most of the HD community simply put out crap back around 2002, but have since upped the quality.

Re:Hard Drive Voodoo?

[LurkerXXX (667952)]

Mod parent up. It sounds like the grandparent is basing his judgement off of a handfull of hard drives he has personally owned. Statistics off of such a low sample number are very bad. Talk to someone who works at a large corp in is charge of hundreds or thousands of drives. I think you will quickly revise your attitude towards Seagate. There is a reson they have a 5 year warrenty and Maxtor only has a 1 year.

Re:Hard Drive Voodoo?

[COMON$ (806135)]

I will back you up on that, I am personally in charge of near a thousand computers on our network. The worst luck I have is with maxtors by far. We had a series of external drives that burned themselves out after a short period, with a light load. I can excuse one but had all 7 fail. Not to mention we run dell here and have a good combination of maxtor and Western Digital. I feel a bit of sorrow when I send a computer with a maxtor drive out, knowing that I will be seeing it again soon. Really hurts when I am sending the unit 400 miles to the site...

I am sold on Western Digital, 5 year contract, excellent drives, got a 10K raptor at home myself. Low failure rate in our enterprise environment. Cant vouch for seagate though, havent had too much exposure to them other than the dirt cheap 300GB I bought that was DOA.

Re:Hard Drive Voodoo?

[gr8_phk (621180)]

"There is a reson they have a 5 year warrenty and Maxtor only has a 1 year."

So now all the Seagate drives that failed quality control can finally be sold anyway - under the Maxtor brand.

Warranty not a good measure

[egarland (120202)]

A warranty is a good measure of how reliable a manufacturer EXPECTS a drive to be, not how reliable it actually is. The deathstars, for example, were much more failure prone than IBM expected. There is no way to know about issues like that from warranty information. MTBF numbers usually given out are the same thing, not based in actual data but based on engineering estimates.

To know how reliable a drive is, you have to know actual failure rates. Only the manufacturer is typically in a position to accurately measure those and they pretty much never give it out without an NDA or court order. We on the outside are left manually piecing together the data using methods like The storage review drive reliablity survey:

http://www.storagereview.com/map/lm.cgi/survey_log in [storagereview.com]

which attempts to gather accurate statistics from large samplings from users. This seems like a lot of work but hopefully it will pry the window open and convince manufacturers that it won't be the end of the world if people know how reliable their drives actually are.

Dude, get over it

[Junior J. Junior III (192702)]

All hard drives die. Do you think there's one magic brand that never breaks? They all do.

There might be varying levels of quality among specific brands and models, but data loss is inevitable if your only line of defense is faith in your bullet proof manufacturer who has never failed on you before. Everyone has one, and every one's is different. Some people have an incredible string of luck with Seagate, others with WD, etc. They all die. If you don't have a robust backup plan that you test regularly, you're going to get fucked at some point. If you've worked with computers long enough, you learn this and understand it.

I look at a hard drive like most people look at a roll of toilet paper. I use it, it serves its purpose, it gets discarded. The data on it, however, is nearly sacred, and I take every precaution I can afford to protect mine. If I lose data, then I feel like I lost a pet. But I don't have any special attachment to my hard drives whatsoever.

Having faith in a hard drive vendor is like a quaint superstition from the time when people were so poor that they might only have a single hard drive containing all the data they've ever generated in their entire lifetime.

Re:Dude, get over it

[Zebadias (861722)]

"I look at a hard drive like most people look at a roll of toilet paper. I use it, it serves its purpose, it gets discarded. The data on it, however, is nearly sacred, and I take every precaution I can afford to protect mine."

You sir, value crap far too much!

Re:Woah there!

[vertinox (846076)]

If I lose data, then I feel like I lost a pet.

Woah there! Maybe you are taking this data thing too seriously.

Come to think of it... I used to be just like you. I always had redudant copies of hard drives, then copies of those, and then I went all the way and got a RAID controller and started out with Raid 5 but I figured that wasn't good enough to I mirrored that...

After about 10 years of doing this (since 1995... I still got backups of my old IBM PS1 on my current computer) I realized:

"What the fuck do I need all this data for?"

I've got shit I don't even remember. Hard drives just laying in my closet full to the brim of stuff I don't even know what is on. CDRs and CDRs of shit I backed up but yet I don't know what good it will do me because everything I now use is stuff I downloaded or bought in the last 6 months.

Maybe I'm too ADD, but I just can't keep up with crap that I did even a year ago that is worth keeping.

My suggestion to break this cycle. Pull out a random hard drive from a closet (or computer) that you can't remember what you put on it and format it and install something like Ubuntu or whatever OS you want to play around with.

It feels painful at first as you watch the progress of the install go by when you know you could be loosing valuable data, but you know what... If you can't remember what you put on their it probaly wasn't worth keeping.

Yes, data hording is an addiction and I had the same problem too so I understand how hard it can be to try to keep bit of data I have came across in my life time. I still need to ebay all these seagate drives...

Anecdotes mean nothing

[brunes69 (86786)]

I have had an IBM "DeathStar" for the past 5 years (yes, it is a 75GXP, the bad ones). Never had a problem with it.

On the other hand, I have had one of your beloved Maxtors totally crap out on me after only having it for 6 months?

What does this mean? Nothing. Hard drives are no different from elevisions or laptops any other piece of complicated equipment when it comes to reliability - on large scale average all the big brands have simmilar failure rates plus or minus a percentage point.

If you are worried about your data theres just a few you can do.

1. BACKUP OFTEN
2. Spend the extra $$$ on a server-class SCSI drive. If reliability is your aim it is well worth it. Regardless of the brand a server-class SCSI drive is much more reliable cause they are designed with heavy abuse in mind. The downside is they are noisy.
3. BACKUP OFTEN
4. Use a redundant RAID configuration
5. BACKUP OFTEN

That's about it - loyalty to a given brand will get you nowhere, in the end they are all the same - for the most part good, but a bad batch once in a while.

Personally, I just buy the cheapest drives I can find and run them in my RAID array. If one fails, no big deal. And it saves a ton of cash.

Re:Hard Drive Voodoo?

[afidel (530433)]

I guess this is a good time to bring up the storagereview reliability database [storagereview.com]. It's the only third party tracking of HDD reliability that I am aware of. Whenever I buy a new HDD or have one die or taken out of service I go to storagereview and update my profile. Other people may not be so reliable, and people with problems are probably more likely to report then happy customers, but it WILL give you a good idea model vs model of the reliability of a drive.

Re:Hard Drive Voodoo?

[croddy (659025)]

What I'd like to ask slashdot readers is for a good way to measure drive quality other than throwing down chicken bones and looking at them or reading tea leaves?

I think the real question here is: did Seagate buy Maxtor for $1,900,000,000 . . . or for $2,040,109,465??

Crap

[Toby The Economist (811138)]

There aren't many big players in the hard disk market.

I'm not that enthusisatic about loosing one of them.

All your bits are belong to us

[digitaldc (879047)]

So this will mean cheaper HDD prices? Or are we to expect more expensive or stagnant pricing due to the elimination of competition?

Re:All your bits are belong to us

[Ritz_Just_Ritz (883997)]

I wouldn't expect any further consolidation in the hard drive business to result in more price competition. There are only a very small number of manufacturers as it is. I suspect that hard drive prices have more or less bottomed out now in the "bargain" segment of the industry and that with current limits on areal density of data on the platters that any differentiation in prices will be based on performance rather than capacity.

One can only hope that someone comes up with some paradigm shift in storage (either in price or capacity) that puts real pressure on the hard disk manufacturers to innovate and remain competitive.

Question

[0xdeadbeef (28836)]

Is that like, $1.9 x 10^9 or $1.9 x 2^30?

What happened to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act

[Yartrebo (690383)]

Considering that the hard drive industry is already quite concentrated and that the largest company in the market is doing the buying, how can the justice department possibly approve this merger.

Then again, they approved of other such travesties as Exxon + Mobil, Viacom + CBS, Disney + Capital Cities, News Corp + Direct TV, and countless other clearly anti-competitive mergers throughout the last decade or two.

Allowing this merger will do nothing but slow down innovation and increase prices.

Has the Sherman Anti-Trust Act been repealed, or am I missing something here?

For those keeping score...

[Stavr0 (35032)]

2000 - Maxtor buys Quantum's hard drive division
2002 - Hitachi buys IBM HD division
2006?- Seagate buys Quantum

So we're down to Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital and Samsung. Any other HD brands you see are OEM'd by them.

Intellectual Property

[necro81 (917438)]

Seagate may have a lot of reasons for wanting to absorb Maxtor. Certainly Seagate will ultimately profit from it, since Maxtor was a decently profitable company (recent slumps in its stockprice nothwithstanding). Eliminating a brand name it has to compete against in the increasingly difficult hard drive market is another.

I actually think that one of the larger reasons has to do with intellectual property. After being around for a bunch of years, Maxtor has a store of worthwhile patents on hard drive technology that Seagate could have a good use for. Being a competitor, it might have been difficult (read: $$$) or impossible for Seagate to license a Maxtor technology with Maxtor as an independent entity. There is also the intellectual property stored up in Maxtors employees: good talent can be hard to find, and if Seagate is expanding and developing more new technologies, it may have been a lot easier to just buy Maxtor (and gain its employees) rather than try expand its workforce at the slow pace of engineering and management recruiting/hiring.

is it me?

[utexaspunk (527541)]

...or does it seem like almost every major national/international market end up in what is essentially a duopoly with a few other minor players? Usually they're red vs blue, too-

Target vs Wal-Mart
Home Depot vs Lowe's
Coke vs Pepsi
Republicans vs Democrats
CVS vs Walgreen's
Nike vs Reebok
Verizon vs Cingular
Firestone vs Goodyear
Marlboro vs Camel
...

There are a lot more that I can't think of right now. I guess since monopolies often get broken up, things tend to stabilize at duopolies...

Actually

[ats-tech (770430)]

The purchase price was $2.9B with a $1B mail in rebate.

Re:This isn't a bad thing

[a_nonamiss (743253)]

OK, my idiocy. Replace "WD" with "Maxtor" in the previous post.