Seagate buys Maxtor for $1.9B 458
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."
Crap (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not that enthusisatic about loosing one of them.
Re:Hard Drive Voodoo? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:All your bits are belong to us (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
2005, yet another sting in the tail. (Score:2, Insightful)
Google & AOL (well 5% of)
Seagate & Maxtor
2005 has been a year of spending money for big players, it seems. Can anyone predict any more big moves before Dec. 1st?
Maxtor == CRAP iff Seagate 'abandons' them... (Score:3, Insightful)
As for Western Digital, other than their HDs running hot, I've had no data loss from them and would recommend them to anyone who can't get/afford Seagate.
What happened to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (Score:4, Insightful)
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Has the Sherman Anti-Trust Act been repealed, or am I missing something here?
Dude, get over it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Intellectual Property (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Anecdotes mean nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Nice logic... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now that Seagate 'owns' Maxtor, will they make Maxtor drives better or just kill the product line off and just use Maxtor's facilities to churn out Seagate HDs?
And pray tell, why the hell do you think that a Seagate drive produced at the same facility with the same equipment would be different than a Maxtor drive? Loyal to the sticker perhaps?
I bet you're one of those people who have a "Piss on Ford" bumper sticker too eh?
Re:What happened to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't neglect the realities of being a corporation in a world that tries to overcontrol many companies in order to subsidize the few. Hard drive companies have one of the biggest problems in balancing cost versus quality.
We've lost MANY hard drive companies over the years. So what? Hard drives are CHEAPER than ever, and we will likely see hard drives get even cheaper than that as companies combine and become more efficient.
If only 2 companies remain and they start to gouge consumers, give it about 2 weeks before investors who see an opportunity come in and bring competition back to prior levels. I don't believe that monopolies are more than temporary unless they are given the power of monopoly through government licensing and regulations.
Re:Hard Drive Voodoo? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And the Corporations shall inherit the earth... (Score:3, Insightful)
This merger isn't about making more profits -- it is about cutting the bleeding that has occured now that hard drive space is a commodity. How many hard drive companies did we have 10 years ago versus today? Do you recall all the companies that are gone now?
How can you look at the prices of hard drives versus the number of companies and see a problem? You're pushing me to think you want regulations added to prevent these merges, but I'm happily buying 300GB hard drives for under $100 and I'm very happy.
Re:Woah there! (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:What happened to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't believe that monopolies are more than temporary unless they are given the power of monopoly through government licensing and regulations.
Huh? Isn't the reason we have these regulations because we've learned from history that the exact opposite of what you're saying is true? Did the government somehow kill competition for standard oil to give them a monopoly? Seriously, I'm asking. Perhaps you know something I don't.
It seems the cool new thing is to blame a company's woes on health care costs, and government regulation. The people who do this tend to ignore that there are a crap-load of companies doing fine with the same costs. Simply because they make products people want to buy. Then there are other companies making crap products who want to blame their dying company on the government. GM -- I'm looking at you.
Re:Woah there! (Score:3, Insightful)
The floppies and cassettes are so old as to have lost much of the data on them. (I confess I haven't stored them properly; but, even had I done so, there is still a good chance of data loss.) And the QIC tapes I have no device capable of reading now. I am quite certain there's some old letters, poems, songs, and other miscellaneous writings on those tapes written with a word processor that's no longer available. So, even if I had a device capable of reading the tapes and restoring the data, I still would need to find a way to get the data out of that old proprietary format and into a format I can use now.
You are correct about the painful part, too. I started throwing old crap away when I had an epiphany similar to yours. Even knowing I'm throwing away things I haven't touched in 20 years and if I did restore it and convert it to a usable format, I still probably would be either: (a) unimpressed; (b) underwhelmed; and/or, (c) embarrassed by it. It's still difficult letting go of it.
Warranty not a good measure (Score:5, Insightful)
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_lo
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.
Re: all hard drives die (Score:3, Insightful)
From those days, i still have a 100% working (zero bad sectors) 3 1/2" IDE (ata) 80mb Seagate (ST3096A). Its last days were spent on a 24hrs dial up BBS i turned off around 97. The drive still works fine. I also used to have a 5 1/4" MFM 40mb Seagate drive (ST251N?) which was used in the same machine; before it, the machine had a 5 1/4" RLL 30mb Seagate ST238R which i used to have on an XT back in the day.
Of the home/desktop drives, Quantum used to be reliable as well, with Western Digital and Maxtor being ok, but about nothing else. Turned out Maxtor got Quantum, and now Seagate got Maxtor; so all that is left is Seagate, Western Digital and the bunch of "newcomers".
I do seem to recall a couple of slave/master issues, but not many. "Cable Select" mode would likely fail with different brands, but the regular master/alave configuration usually worked; maybe one specific drive had to always be the master, but that was about it. Upgrade paths usually involved replacing the drive for a bigger one anyways.
Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's simply destroying a competitor to allow them to monopolize more of the market.
All this crap happened in the 20's. The US became extremely pro-business and anti-regulation, from the supreme court and president down.
This caused the depression. The depression removed the focus on the rich and corporate entities and returned much of the money they looted from the middle and lower classes, we had quite a few prosperous, happy decades.
Now we get to relearn our lesson I guess. Ready for the next depression? Probably only a decade or so out now?
Remember, we don't charter corporations so the shareholders can become rich and powerfully, that is a side-effect; we allow it because it's supposed to help everyone. When it stops helping the general economy and starts simply being self-serving, we need to re-evaluate the system and tweak it a little.
Re:Seagate warranty (Score:3, Insightful)
Which it seems to come down to - so far the best guide has been the reviews' disk temperature benchmarks. After all is said and done, the cooler ones seem to last *much* longer.