Seagate to Control 40-Percent of HDD Market

Interesting how "IHS' tends to turn up so often yet stand for different terms and groups ect. Every thing from satanic cathloc jesuits to hardware lol. Integrated Heat Spreader is one hardware term o.O

Less competition is never a good thing when it comes to electronics of any type.

I dread when this happens to the SSD market

This has Firmly pushed me into a corner,, way to many seagate and samsung failures, the only drives I have not seen fail in the last 4 years is Hitachi, and Ive had a few WD drives fail, but more Samsungs failed in period than all other failures put together!

I will never buy another samsung product!

I'm afraid I must disagree. There is a balance between too little competition and too much. If you have too little, one or two companies control the entire market and have no incentive to lower prices or innovate.

But when you have tons of companies fighting for a slice of the same small pie, corners are cut and quality drops. And how do you recover from this situation? High quality items require investing money to design and manufacture, and then they either need to sell in massive quantities, or they need to be priced very high to remain profitable. If the market is already flooded by millions of cheap devices, it's very difficult to justify an expensive one, no matter how much better built it may be. There are many times when I have found it difficult to find a high quality example of an every day item in the sea of generic chinese knockoffs.

I'm not saying that the hard drive market is at that point right now, but I have no doubt that SSDs will replace a great deal of the mechanical hard drive market in the future. So while I'm not particularly happy with this merge, I recognize that it probably makes good sense to consolidate in the face of a shrinking market. There's less money wasted on re-inventing the wheel and less need to cut corners to remain in the market. In exchange for hard drive prices levelling out somewhat (and they're currently DAMN good, if you ask me,) we might see the quality climb. And that's okay by me.

wow I didn't realise the HDD market was that small, i guess the only positives is that HDD are extremely cheap and at least the emerging SDD market has more competition.

I actually get a few Hitatchi. I get a lot of WD and some Seagate at work, but my personal experience is great with Seagate, ok with WD never messed with the rest. Have 2 Seagate Barracudda 7200 120GBs that are about 8 years old and still kicking.

When there are too few chances for competition things stagnate, I hope this doesn't happen to the HDD market.

This is a good thing for the industry, and I hope it will be as good for the consumers, but I highly doubt it.

I personally have never had a Western Digital, Seagate, or Hitatchi fail fail of me. I have had a few Maxtor drives fail on me, however.
Now if your talking SAS/SCSI, Western Digital has been the king of failures for me, but I've never had a Maxtor, IBM, or Cisco drive fail.

So... my experiences combined with other people's experiences I've heard about have lead me to believe that it is just luck of the draw.

I am a firm believer in Seagate HDD's and have been for years.
I have no issues with them and 40% of the market at all..
A Segate Barracuda and/or a WD VelociRaptor / Raptor is what I run in my ALL my units..

Never had a WD hdd fail on me

Same all my WD hdds have been solid as a rock.

My WD hdds has also never died on me.

my hitachi, wd, seagate died on me too at least once. sooo pretty much all of them.

Capitalism advocates always fail to mention mergers in their equations of the invisible hand. With just 3 companies making the bulk of the HDDs they can fix prices merely by looking at each others prices, and not break any laws. I'm not advocating for socialism, but I advocate for the invisible hand to be the hand of a responsible regulatory government. Same goes for the T-Mobile AT&T deal.

Having a Seagate hard drive is like giving Seagate hostage of your data. It will never work out well...

Will Seagate also have 40% of all HDD failures?

I wept the day I heard that Seagate is swallowing up an another good harddrive manufacturer, which probably means that even more harddrives will commit suicide as soon as the Seagate logo is stamped onto its shell.

I never had any good experience with Seagate drives nor their support. Nor with Western Digital drives. There was a time when I considered WD drives to be great, but that's history. I own over 60 Samsung drives and only one failed on me, and that was because I was stupid enough to fiddle with its power connector while it was running. I managed to save all data by moving the circuit board from a different harddrive, I still keep that drive in case an another Samsung dies, but that has not happened yet. The smallest drives I got from Samsung are 400GB, the largest 2TB drives. All of them has been running 24/7 without a hitch.

I put in two Western Digital drives in my gaming machine (also up 24/7). One of the drives failed 4 months later, the other one 2 months after that. I replaced both with Seagates I got as payment for a job, one of the Seagates failed last week (been up and running for approximately 3 months). Now I am exchanging both for Samsungs. As for my workstation, both drives in it are 2TB Western Digitals. One of the drives is making an awful friction sound. Just as some of my previous WD drives used to make. I will probably replace those too soon and use the WD and Seagate drives only as offline backup drives.

All our data will be in jeopardy if Seagate or Western Digital doesn't improve their shit. Perhaps Seagate will take a lesson from Samsung and use their stuff instead. Then _maybe_ I will consider Seagate again. But only maybe.

It is indeed a dark time for platter based storage.

That is where brand recognition builds. Apple is a good example of brand recognition. The problem with Chinese knockoffs is that they have no problem labeling their products to exact and not just similar to recognized brands, at times even reducing the credibility of the brand itself. If they just are prevented from using their fake names, then the brand names having a price of 20% to 200% higher for the same specifications is very normal. Customers buy peace of mind with that extra brand tax. Or save that extra money if they lack it and research the market themselves.
In the end, my opinion is that this much consolidation of market is too little competitive for my tastes in a global scale.

I guess their tech support staff will be bigger jerks now. Glad I left them years ago.

Duopoly FTL ... My last 4 seagate drives failed within a year(bought them in 2009). I still have 7+ seagates from mid and early 2000's that still work. Their quality went to shit lately. WD on the other hand seem to have improved a lil, out of 6 drives only 1 failed and that was an older raptor. 4 Samsung SJ103 drives that I have in raid 0 also worked pretty good so far so can't complain about them either.

it's time to see more players in the SSD market

They're competing with SSDs, which is slowly encroaching on the HDD market share. Storage and price per GB are the only survivable features of the HDD, so as the gap closes so will the market share.

enroaching.....?
come on man..!

"about 652.4 million drives shipped last year"

The number is absolutely staggering.

en·croach
–verb (used without object)
1. to advance beyond proper, established, or usual limits; make gradual inroads: A dictatorship of the majority is encroaching on the rights of the individual.
2. to trespass upon the property, domain, or rights of another, especially stealthily or by gradual advances.

you spelled it incorrectly is all..

I used to use Seagate drives exclusively with 8 drives in operation, 2 for about 12 years (2.1 & 6.4), and 6 others in 2 systems with 3 drives per system (40, 80, 250g, and 2x80 + 250g). Of those, only the 40g drive gave any trouble where the Win2k partition messed itself. The drive was stored for a while, data recovered via the Win98 partition and Partition Magic, and then used in a secondary system with the Win2k partition rebuilt.

I have 4 external drives. 500g, 750g, 1T, 2T. Only the 1T is a Seagate. ALL of the others are Samsungs. Which drive gives me the most headaches, has had to have all of the data backed up, has had innumerable Windows repair operations, a complete reformat, and still has the "Click-Of-Death"?

It is the Seagate drive. I have now sworn off Seagate drives and use Samsung drives for all new drives.

Now Seagate has decided that world cannot have reliable high performance HDDs and we must use their flaky rubbish instead. If they are better than you, buy them out and close them down!

Buy Samsung 2T drives while they are still available!

If Seagate wants to get my trust back, they must get the warranty to 5 years as it was before.