Seagate: Can There Be Only One?
Seagate: Can There Be Only One?
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Across seemingly all kinds of products, we’re taught that variety is good. More choice is better. Certainly, it’s better for the product manufacturers, who find that they can scale up profit margins as buyers look at increasingly “premium” models in their line-up. But this doesn’t answer the essential question: is more choice always better for buyers? Might they in fact be better off with just one model that does everything at a single, moderate price?
This is the question Seagate now asks with its move to a single desktop hard drive, Barracuda. No longer will we have an “eco-friendly” model and a performance model and a mainstream model. There’s just one model, a straight up Seagate Desktop HDD, or Barracuda. This stands in contrast to Seagate’s chief rival, Western Digital, which not only has these three models (the Green, Black, and Blue, respectively) but also a new niche drive for NAS devices, the Red.

With WD adding models and Seagate working to simplify its desktop drive family, one has to wonder at the difference in strategies and which company is better serving the needs of buyers. We’ve seen the presentations that detail Seagate’s in-house test results, and, not surprisingly, they paint a fairly rosy picture in Seagate’s favor. As you’ll see in a bit, we ran a 1 TB Seagate Barracuda against WD’s three main competitors, and the results are less obvious. Seagate does not sweep the field. But that doesn’t mean that the company’s strategy is wrong, only that there is no clear performance leader.
Let’s dig into this question more deeply and see if Seagate is right in asserting that there should be only one.
Consolidation and Quagmire
On Christmas Eve, 1954, IBM filed for a patent on what would become the disk drive. Big Blue released the first hard drive in 1956, and over the following decades, roughly 200 manufacturers would come and go from the business. Hard drive vendors such as Conner, Epson, Memorex, Micropolis, Rodime, Tandem, Syquest, and many others might stir the memories of industry old-timers. Even Apple took its turn with the 20 MB Widget drive for the Lisa.
As with any maturing market, shakeout was inevitable. The ‘80s saw many hard drive divisions shut down, and bankruptcies abounded. In the ‘90s, the wave of consolidations began. For example, in 1994, DEC’s disk division went to Quantum. Quantum sold off to Maxtor in 2000, and Maxtor in turn went to Seagate in 2006. Last year, as if in a synchronized crescendo, WD snapped up Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (which itself had absorbed IBM’s pioneering disk division in 2002) and Seagate nabbed Samsung’s disk unit.