Seagate May Buy Samsung HDD Unit
Seagate has come under substantial pressure when Western Digital announced that it would buy Hitachi's HDD unit for $4.3 billion, making it the leading HDD maker worldwide.
Fortunately, Samsung's HDD unit appears to be for sale as well and, at least according to the Wall Street Journal, it appears that Seagate is an interested buyer.
Samsung isn't quite as large as Hitachi and it won't give Seagate the market lead at this time, but it’s a closer game and it would give Seagate more volume to compete. Samsung has about 18% of the HDD market, according to iSuppli.
The rumored purchase price of Samsung's HDD unit is about $1.5 billion, while Samsung would also consider deals for less than $1 billion, sources told the Journal. However, Seagate may think twice about such an acquisition since the $1.9 billion purchase of Maxtor back in 2005 did not go too well and the company needed several years to integrate the business and recover from the impact. We don't think this is a done deal yet.
While HDDs are still see as dominant mass storage products in applications where cheap storage is attractive (servers, PCs, notebooks) it makes sense that Samsung condenses its product portfolio and considers a sale of its money-losing HDD unit. The opportunity in Flash memory, where Samsung has the dominant lead, may be more attractive in the long run for the company, especially if tablets will be as successful as analysts predict.
Seagate and Samsung declined to comment on the WSJ report.
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Grrr, Seagate. We meet again, nemesis. Don't pollute Samsung with your evil ways of HDD failure.
I'm glad that Seagate is doing well, I've never had any storage problems while using their drives.
No matter who Seagate buys up i'll never feel confident about buying their HDD's
Oh no !!!! I like and have had very good luck with Samsung HDD's. Not one failure yet, out of 30-35 drives. Seagate has a bad reputation with me. I've replaced too many of their drives (along with Maxtor) to ever consider spending my $'s on anything with Seagate's name on it. It would be a bad move in my opinion , a waste of a good reputation .... only WD would be left as a reliable source for reliable hard drives.
Spend a lot of time studying the reviews on newegg and you'll find that Seagate reliability is the worst.
WD can buy Hitachi and improve Hitachi. Seagate can buy Samsung and pull them down to Seagate's level.
Exactly what consumer needs: a duopoly between Seagate and WD ...
oh hell no.
if anything, samsung should buy seagate.
A longer warranty doesn't equal better reliability. Seagate proves it.
I hope this improves the quality of future Seagate drives, because I have had nothing but problems from the last several drives I have got from them. Worst two were the 7200.11 1.5TB and the LP 2TB drive I got from them. The 1.5TB barely made it a year before giving up the ghost, and the 2TB didnt even last a whole day before it keeled over. I RMA'd the LP drive and got me a Samsung Spinpoint F4 and was actually impressed by how well it performs, especially for a 5400rpm drive (Its faster then the 7200rpm Seagate drive)
Anyway, long winded rant aside, I may be going back to WD if they end up messing this up.
years agos seagate was the best...now I stay away from their failing rubbish...I just go WD or even Hitachi
^ hey tomshardware, give us an edit button
^ hey tomshardware, give us an edit button
they already do...
Years ago, Seagate was THE hd to buy, with samsungs and hitachi's being worthless paperweights. Now it seems WD is the best and the rest are useful for door stoppers and not much else....
Maybe, just maybe, Seagate will get a quality boost out of this, but as the old saying goes: "Two wrongs don't make a right."
Don't sell it Samsung! Seagate will mess up the HDD models. Too many Seagate drives failed. I haven't been buying Seagate for several years now.
No issues with Samsung drives so far.
Years ago, Seagate was THE hd to buy, with samsungs and hitachi's being worthless paperweights. Now it seems WD is the best and the rest are useful for door stoppers and not much else....Maybe, just maybe, Seagate will get a quality boost out of this, but as the old saying goes: "Two wrongs don't make a right."
but 3 lefts do
I've had drives from all manufacturers fail on me. there is a stated failure rate for a reason.
If Seagate buys Samsung, I hope they do better products if it stills same product reliability I will keep on buying only WD. But I would like to try with something new of seagate and CHEAPER.
this is epic if it happens. This takes private fledgling Seagate back into a main stream fight with WD. Go Go Competition!
you couldnt give me a seagate drive. i have had 8 1TB drives fail from seagate. all were purchased at the same time, all have failed at least twice. one time i got an RMA back and it started clicking as soon as it was powered up the first time. All HD companies will have failures. but the rate at which seagate drives have been failing the last year or so i just plain criminal.
hitachi is the 1 that i can trust , i hate to see it acquired by crappy WD , i don't hv anything on seagate and samsung , i use them as alternative of hitachi , i only wan to avoid the crappy WD , but i hope toshiba buy samsung more then seagate , so toshiba can start to produce desktop drives .
I'm surprised by the number of people not happy with Seagate drives. Yes, the 7200.11s 1TB or larger had the firmware issue. I have 3 of the 7200.10s going strong, no issues with them at all. I have 3 SATA WD drives laying around here that are dead, the last one was a 500GB AAKS drive out of my wife's computer. She's major pissed because it had all her family photos on it. (yes, I never copied them onto my computer, my fault for not backing up.)
I agree however that this is bad. We probably will be soon down to only WD and Seagate. Not a pretty picture.
I'm glad that Seagate is doing well, I've never had any storage problems while using their drives.
So you've never used one of their drives then?
Let me tell you a little story.
Once upon a time I thought that surely Seagate wouldn't make as bad server drives as it did workstation ones. So when I got two new hp dl380's equipped with 1tb seagate drives I wasn't too worried. That was january 2009. Fast forward 5 months, and I've had one complete system failure (because two drives broke before I had gotten one new back), and 3 times was I running in a degraded array due to one disk going bad. I had two of those servers, in two different locations (in fact over 60km apart), and they both broke down due to drive failures.
In comparison we've had some eonstor inexpensive storage boxes running for about 3 or 4 years before the first hitashi drive broke (1 drive out of 78) running continuously. And if you disregard the WD 500gb and the early raptor 36gb drives, wd's got a very low fail rate too. Not compared to hitachi - nobody touches them. But still. Maxtor on the other hand always broke down. Especially the flatter 3.5" ide drives (20-80gb) - then seagate bought it and fixed ... absolutely nothing. A fair guess would be that I've had about 120-140 maxtor & seagate drives fail me over the last 10 years, and approx 30 other drives total at work.
In short - I don't trust seagate one bit. At home I've got samsung, hitachi and wd drives only. If it's my money, I'm not going to spend it on seagate. They may produce all their own parts, but appearently they don't know how to put them together.
I'm surprised by the number of people not happy with Seagate drives. Yes, the 7200.11s 1TB or larger had the firmware issue. I have 3 of the 7200.10s going strong, no issues with them at all. I have 3 SATA WD drives laying around here that are dead, the last one was a 500GB AAKS drive out of my wife's computer. She's major pissed because it had all her family photos on it. (yes, I never copied them onto my computer, my fault for not backing up.) I agree however that this is bad. We probably will be soon down to only WD and Seagate. Not a pretty picture.
Seagate before maxtor wasn't bad, they just weren't very present in the cheap pc segment. They were premium drives sort of. But after maxtor they've changed their philosophy away from quality in favor of quantity. Most drives that break aren't being replaced, as shipping costs are too high for a low capacity drive, so a bad drive just means another drive sold.
and yes the 500gb wd drives aren't good. I've had to send in 7 or 8 of those drives over a 3 year period before replacing all the small drives with 4 2tb ones last year.
be a sad day for Samsung, never had a problem with their drives. got enough WD/Seagate drives dead to build a wall.
Seagate before maxtor wasn't bad, they just weren't very present in the cheap pc segment. They were premium drives sort of. But after maxtor they've changed their philosophy away from quality in favor of quantity. Most drives that break aren't being replaced, as shipping costs are too high for a low capacity drive, so a bad drive just means another drive sold. and yes the 500gb wd drives aren't good. I've had to send in 7 or 8 of those drives over a 3 year period before replacing all the small drives with 4 2tb ones last year.
It could have been faulty from the start..
Hitachi makes the best laptop harddrives, with fastest iops, though slower burst speeds,
And western digital has the fastest burst speeds, but slower iops.
If they become one, we can forget about the best laptop harddrives ever created, and will probably need to buy sub par harddrives that only suit teenage gamers who only want to show off how fast a 4GB movie can be copied, and don't care about OS booting times or anything like that!
This sucks!
I would have expected Hitachi to stay in business, especially since they do have the best harddrives for business laptops, and even home theaters!
It could have been faulty from the start..
define 'it' a bit better please?
not may anymore but buys or bought
I had a mid-30s GB WD Raptor last me about 7 years- it only failed when I tried to install Windows 7 on it
. WD is really the only brand I am confident in. Currently I run 2 WD Blacks in RAID 0.
HDD life depends on the computer environment. You can have the most dependable drives on the planet and if the environment is hot, and full of vibrations then you will shorten the life much faster. The number one way to kill a HDD is a hot environment.
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,2681.html
"Don't pollute Samsung with your evil ways of HDD failure"
i work on computers all day every day and samsung/toshiba/hitachi are the 3 brands that have the highest failure rates. I hear samsung makes real nice enterprise class drives but their consumer grade drives are garbage.