Seagate to Buy Samsung's Hard Drive Business

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Seagate Technology announced today that it is buying Samsung's hard drive business for $1.38B. What is going on lately? Didn't WD just buy Hitachi's hard drive unit last month?

Samsung has agreed to supply Seagate with chips for its hard drives. Seagate, meanwhile, will supply disk drives for Samsung's PCs, notebook computers and consumer electronics. As part of the deal, a Samsung executive will be nominated to join Seagate's board. Samsung plans to pay Seagate in cash and stock.
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This is could be a good thing for Seagate. If Samsung is supplying the chips then hopefully they will also be supplying the firmware that goes on them. Which means less dead Seagates.
 
I've never had a problem with Seagate. I even have the 1.5 TB ones that had firmware issues. I never bothered updating them either.

Wonder what is with all the companies getting out of the hdd business. Guess they think SSDs are the way to go or something. WD bought Hitachi. Seagate bought Maxtor. Now they're buying Samsung.
 
caniba said:
I just hope they learn something and produce a reliable drive.
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It's funny because at work, we have around 600 desktop PC's, every single one has a Seagate drive. We've never had a hard drive die. Some are 4 years old and the rest are 5 years old.

Yet I do work for people on the side and the only HDD's I've ever had die on me were Seagates. I do not buy them personally because of this. I prefer WD.

As for the buyout, there are only two LCD manufacturers, right? So once we discovered they were price fixing and they got caught, prices have now came down. As long as WD, Seagate, and Toshiba don't team up to fix prices we should be OK. That's what lawyers are for :D
 
so.. it's basically just seagate and WD left??

truth be told.. i think the HD makers r smart in leaving the HD market while the value is still high...
 
Question is... who will buy Seagate/WD?

Will it be Seagate? Western Digital? Mr. Garrison?
 
bigdogchris said:
It's funny because at work, we have around 600 desktop PC's, every single one has a Seagate drive. We've never had a hard drive die. Some are 4 years old and the rest are 5 years old.

Yet I do work for people on the side and the only HDD's I've ever had die on me were Seagates. I do not buy them personally because of this. I prefer WD.

As for the buyout, there are only two LCD manufacturers, right? So once we discovered they were price fixing and they got caught, prices have now came down. As long as WD, Seagate, and Toshiba don't team up to fix prices we should be OK. That's what lawyers are for :D
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Not sure how up to date I am on the LCD business, but it's Samsung, LG, Sony, and Nec/Mitsubishi right?
 
krotch said:
I've never had a problem with Seagate. I even have the 1.5 TB ones that had firmware issues. I never bothered updating them either.

Wonder what is with all the companies getting out of the hdd business. Guess they think SSDs are the way to go or something. WD bought Hitachi. Seagate bought Maxtor. Now they're buying Samsung.
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I'm thinking drives have gotten to a point where reliability is a challenge and more money and time needs to be poured into R&D. Samsung's undoubtedly too busy with everything else to focus too much on drives. Seagate and Western Digital are primarily disk manufacturers, so they have the time and resources in place.
 
Azhar said:
and TrekStor - a little known German drive manufacturer.
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Whatever, I'm only going to list the more common manufacturers. In addition, I don't see Toshiba for really anything besides notebook HDDs.
 
kirtar said:
Whatever, I'm only going to list the more common manufacturers. In addition, I don't see Toshiba for really anything besides notebook HDDs.
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Didn't mean to come off as know-it-all, just adding to your list.

As for Toshiba, they're also widely used in servers as well. But I agree about not seeing them often in desktop computers. Even cheap HP and Dell desktops are almost always equipped with Western Digital and Seagates. HP used to lean heavily on Maxtor before Seagate acquired them.
 
Azhar said:
Didn't mean to come off as know-it-all, just adding to your list.

As for Toshiba, they're also widely used in servers as well. But I agree about not seeing them often in desktop computers. Even cheap HP and Dell desktops are almost always equipped with Western Digital and Seagates. HP used to lean heavily on Maxtor before Seagate acquired them.
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hmmm didn't know about the server part, but that wouldn't surprise me (I really only looked at consumer drives).
 
bigdogchris said:
Yet I do work for people on the side and the only HDD's I've ever had die on me were Seagates. I do not buy them personally because of this. I prefer WD.
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This is my experience too and why I don´t trust Seagate. Personally, I have only had one hard drive die on my and it was the one that came with my laptop.
 
I've only had Maxtor and WD fail on me. 1 Maxtor and like 4 WDs. No Seagates. The WDs seem to work fine in just a desktop, but slap a bunch of them together and the heat just seems to kill them quicker.
 
The way things are going, the only competition left will be in the SSD market.
Had bad history with WD. Multiple bad drives with issues with their RMA department.
Had bad history with Seagate. Desktop raid issue where it took forever for them to admit they had an issue with their drives.
Only had one issue with Samsung, and they admit to it right away and got me a new firmware.
My concern is not with Seagate's firmware, its their customer service.
 
Just bought two new Spinpoint F3's yesterday when I heard the rumors about the sale. Glad I purchased them before the Samsung Spinpoint stocks are gone at Newegg.
 
don't forget fugi and HP. HP is a big hard drive supplier in the enterprise business, i wouldn't be surprised if HP bought one of the other HDD companys
 
I'm with ya Solidastate89....need to grab asome before Seagate screws up the Samsung hardware/firmware.
Samsungs have been the singlemost reliable and quietest hdd's I've owned.
Any of 'em fail? One out of about 15...Seagates have been the worst with WD's Blue line drives right behind them
I'm disappointed with the sale
 
I had 2 35GB Raptors for 8 years before I replaced them this year with a Crucial 64GB SSD. They were starting to take a little bit more time accessing and accessing when everything was idle (far more than usual). Still, 8 years is pretty damn good for drive that were rode hard all that time.
 
Well there goes the good quality of samsung drives. :(

...the agreement will expand the strategic relationship between the two companies, as Samsung will be providing Seagate with a NAND flash memory for its solid state drives, solid state hybrid drives and other products.

Meanwhile, Seagate will supply disk drives to Samsung for PCs, notebooks and consumer electronics....
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Source: Wireupdate (can't post the hotlink here, but it's on slashdot)
 
NOOOOOO. At least they went to Seagate and not that shit-hole WD. Everyone has their preferences, mine just changed back to Seagate I guess.
 
mickster said:
Seagates have been the worst with WD's Blue line drives right behind them
I'm disappointed with the sale
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Yeah, I have a 500GB Seagate that I got because of the price and even though it's only maybe a year old, having heard the stories of them, I fear for the data on it.

Seagate used to be really good. Oh well, I will get a 64MB cache dual controller WD drive to replace it. SSDs still aren't really great for game drives, at least not totally yet.
 
Heh all this talk about how good Samsung drives are, and I am just sitting down to call my customer and let them know they have a failed HDD...which is a Samsung.
I still love Samsung and was actually about to get some of their 2TB drives as I am running out of room on the 4 x 1TB ones I am running currently.
 
Anyone else think it odd (in a good way) that an American manufacturer is buying an Asian company?

WD buys Hitachi. Seagate buys Samsung.
 
Is that another way of saying that the American company sucked, so they had to get the goods from an Asian company?
 
pxc said:
"NOOOOOO!"

"Do not want!"
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Here. Let me help.

NNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!


God fucking damnit. Am I going to have to go out and stock up on "Pre-Seagate Samsung" Drives now before those drives turn to shit, too?
 
krotch said:
I've only had Maxtor and WD fail on me. 1 Maxtor and like 4 WDs. No Seagates. The WDs seem to work fine in just a desktop, but slap a bunch of them together and the heat just seems to kill them quicker.
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oddly enough, the same experience here..Maxtor the weakest and WD following..even with the big uproar with Seagate I have found them to be reliable. I currently run C300s now and a few seagates for the bulk of my data that only needs to be accessed.
 
It's seems to be an unwritten rule that the companies that you dislike always buy out the brands that you prefer. Case in point: I prefer(ed) Hitachi and Samsung hard drives.

I suppose it was inevitable however; the market is moving toward flash storage and most people don't need more that a terabyte or two - if even that.
 
My samsung f1 500gb spinpoint is dying on me..after about 3 years now. My brothers like 5 year old seagate is just starting to die. Next hdd will be a WD. No more samsung and since seagate is aquiring them, not seagate for me then either.
 
Ugh. Guess I better buy another F3 or F4 while I can before they turn to crap.
Good HD company buying bad HD company = GOOD news.
Bad HD company buying good HD company = HORRIBLE news.

I own 4 Seagates. The only one that's quiet and cool is the 2.5" one.
All 3 7200.10's are some of the noisiest, hottest running drives I've ever seen (especially the 7200.10 750gig). Granted, they haven't failed. (The 750 has the annoying "click to park/unpark the head" that drives me nuts but it hasn't failed.) That being said - I don't like Seagate drives anymore.

Looks like it's WD or nothing for me in the future then. Unless the craptitude of Hitachi and Maxtor start eeking into the WD division. :rolleyes:
 
Mainly I hate the lack of choices, so I don't like this. I don't really like Seagate because I've always found them to be slow and loud. I just bought my first Samsungs recently for a RAID and I've already had 1 drive have problems after 3 months, so I'm kinda eh on Samsung, but unfortunately there isn't a good answer for what company to buy from, they all seem to have drawbacks now, even WD who I usually trust.
 
Bummer, Samsung makes some of the best and quietest storage drives out there. Luckily, I just replaced all my 1tb drives with 2tb F4's. Have to check sometimes to see if my server is actually running.

The only drives I have ever had die on me were Maxtor's and Seagates.

I hope Seagate becomes better for it, but I doubt it.
 
Domllama said:
oddly enough, the same experience here..Maxtor the weakest and WD following..even with the big uproar with Seagate I have found them to be reliable. I currently run C300s now and a few seagates for the bulk of my data that only needs to be accessed.
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Ya, Maxtor by far was the worst. It failed after like 5 months. I didn't bother RMAing it, as I didn't even want another Maxtor.

My WD ones were fine. Until I started buying a lot of 320 GB ones and putting them all into my server (a total of 23 during the time). They slowly started failing one after the other. I started splitting up the drives between my 3 comps and they did better.

I started using Seagates at the 500 GB size. They didn't seem to care about the heat at all. Now, they definitely felt slower than the WDs though. Since then, only Seagates go in my server.

I still buy WDs and Seagates for my regular desktop. Whichever is easiest for me to get my hands on. I've recently been buying externals from Bestbuy and ripping the drives out of them. It ends up being the same cost or cheaper than ordering from Newegg. Not to mention I get a usb cable and A/C adapter to dick around with.
 
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