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."

Uh oh!

[mister_llah]

Evil empires everywhere, the market share clumps, competition lessens!

Darth Seagate.... riiiise!

Question

[0xdeadbeef]

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

Re:lol...

[unitron]

"anyone else read that as Seagate buys Maxtor for $1.98 ???"

Yeah, but that's after the rebate, if it ever arrives.

Re:Dude, get over it

[Zebadias]

"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!

Actually

[ats-tech]

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

Re:Hard Drive Voodoo?

[Skater]

I had an ST238R fail years ago! Seagate is the suxxor!

Just kidding. I've had quite a few brands of hard drives and that Seagate is the only one that's failed for me (and I even own a Quantum Bigfoot!), but I wouldn't have a problem buying another Seagate or other brand.

I've discovered the way to keep a hard drive working is to back up regularly. Drives only fail when you don't have backups.

(For any readers that don't know what an ST238 drive is...it was a 32 megabyte drive produced by Seagate back when 32 megs was the DOS upper limit. The R stood for RLL encoding, and they were also available in MFM encoding I think. Oh what a mess we weave when we amiss interleave! Or something like that.)

Read the fine print

[OldManAndTheC++]

"Reuters reports that Seagate Technology would buy rival computer disk-drive maker Maxtor Corp. for $1.9 billion"

Actually it's $2.6 billion, with a $700 million rebate.

And that puppy expires December 31, so they'd better remember to send it in.

Re:Do you want a harddrive?

[zlogic]

Apple vs Mac vs *NIX/Linux

Sure, Apple hates Mac just like Microsoft would love to fucking kill MSN!

Re:Hard Drive Voodoo?

[gr8_phk]

"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.

Re:Hard Drive Voodoo?

[croddy]

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??

Re:Actually

[Anonymous Coward]

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

...and they're counting on a certain percentage to forget to mail in the rebate.

Re:is it me?

[Levetron]

I thought it was:
CVS vs. Subversion