Jump to content
House Price Crash Forum

Duopoly Time In Hard Drives Consumers Now Have A Choice Of Seagate Or Wd


Recommended Posts

0
HOLA441
Posted

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/seagate-lands-samsungs-hard-drive-unit-for-137-billion-its-duopoly-time/47442?tag=nl.e539

Seagate has acquired Samsung Electronics’ hard disk drive (HDD) operations for $1.37 billion in a move that boils the market down to two players. Seagate and Western Digital now control 90 percent of the HDD market with Toshiba a distant third.

Under the terms of the deal, Samsung will lump its HDD unit into Seagate in exchange for a cash and stock deal worth $1.375 billion. Samsung will own nearly 10 percent of Seagate and the two companies will cross-license patents. Samsung will also provide NAND flash memory for Seagate’s solid-state drives. In addition, Seagate will supply drives for Samsung’s PCs.

Great news for the consumer here, you want a hard drive you can pick between 2 companies.

Several years ago the consumer had real choice between Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, IBM (Hitachi), Samsung, Fujitsu, now you have none. Great news for prices I'm sure.

1
HOLA442
Posted

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/seagate-lands-samsungs-hard-drive-unit-for-137-billion-its-duopoly-time/47442?tag=nl.e539

Great news for the consumer here, you want a hard drive you can pick between 2 companies.

Several years ago the consumer had real choice between Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, IBM (Hitachi), Samsung, Fujitsu, now you have none. Great news for prices I'm sure.

In the short term. Longer term hard drives I reckon are dead meat apart from all but the most price sentive and high volume applications like server farms. Goign the same way as the floppy - this one was a monster.

floppy.jpg

SSD large format disks - more reliable, quieter, more power effcient, smaller and blisteringly fast compared t hard drives- just the price hurdle to overcome. The performance gain from an SSD disk is probably offset by the equivalent cost of a faster processor already.

2
HOLA443
Posted

But in SSDs we have:

Buffalo

Corsair

Crucial

Hewlett Packard

IBM

Imation

Intel

Kingston

Maxell

OCZ

PNY

Samsung

Scythe

Verbatim

Western Digital

Just scraped off Novatech site. How many are clones of each other I don't know.

3
HOLA444
Posted

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/seagate-lands-samsungs-hard-drive-unit-for-137-billion-its-duopoly-time/47442?tag=nl.e539

Great news for the consumer here, you want a hard drive you can pick between 2 companies.

Several years ago the consumer had real choice between Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, IBM (Hitachi), Samsung, Fujitsu, now you have none. Great news for prices I'm sure.

If they charge too much (either through a cartel or just laziness), don't they just open up the market to competition?

4
HOLA445
Posted

If they charge too much (either through a cartel or just laziness), don't they just open up the market to competition?

Cost of entry and scale would preclude it - especially for an outgoing tech.

5
HOLA446
Posted

SSD large format disks - more reliable, quieter, more power effcient, smaller and blisteringly fast compared t hard drives- just the price hurdle to overcome. The performance gain from an SSD disk is probably offset by the equivalent cost of a faster processor already.

Except SSDs have a limited number of read write cycles and are designed that way as part of planned obselecence.

While OTOH HDDs have the potential to last for a very very long time even though they have moving parts. One of my HDDs still works and was only mothballed in 2008, it still spins it still reads and writes data. The server another forum was hosted on had been spinning at 5000 or so RPM for the past decade until he came and replaced it. It was still working fine but the server was overloaded as the forum had grown from <500 members to 172000 members and page load times were taking forever.

6
HOLA447
7
HOLA448
Posted

But in SSDs we have:

Buffalo

Corsair

Crucial

Hewlett Packard

IBM

Imation

Intel

Kingston

Maxell

OCZ

PNY

Samsung

Scythe

Verbatim

Western Digital

Just scraped off Novatech site. How many are clones of each other I don't know.

There are two manufacturers of flash memory - Samsung, and a joint venture between Sandisk and Toshiba.

8
HOLA449
Posted

Except SSDs have a limited number of read write cycles and are designed that way as part of planned obselecence.

Don't be stupid. It's a consequence of them being cheaper, if you want them to last forever you throw 90% of your yield away and the ones that you keep are then ten times more expensive.

So to counter the blocks that die you provide spare ones to replace them (using complex software).

But I don’t accept that SSDs can replace disks. The storage capacity of disks is almost 1000 times that of SSDs and it isn't only servers that need the capacity

tim

9
HOLA4410
10
HOLA4411
Posted

Don't be stupid. It's a consequence of them being cheaper, if you want them to last forever you throw 90% of your yield away and the ones that you keep are then ten times more expensive.

So to counter the blocks that die you provide spare ones to replace them (using complex software).

But I don’t accept that SSDs can replace disks. The storage capacity of disks is almost 1000 times that of SSDs and it isn't only servers that need the capacity

tim

Things moving on 100gb - £100.

2 million hour MTBF!

Back to cloud computing - computer shuffles user files unused in say last 6 months onto a storage server leaving you with much more usable space.

11
HOLA4412
12
HOLA4413
Posted

They'll still breakdown. I've never had or used at work a piece of equipment with a HDD inside not have a HDD eventually fail.

I think my first HDD was a 5Mb Seagate.

I must have been lucky, never had a total HDD failure. I had an IBM "Death Star" that started making knocking noises, but it held together long enough for me to clone it. SSDs have been totally reliable, two Samsungs and two Intels.

SSDs knock spots of any HDD, Ultra SCSI included.

13
HOLA4414
Posted

I think my first HDD was a 5Mb Seagate.

I must have been lucky, never had a total HDD failure. I had an IBM "Death Star" that started making knocking noises, but it held together long enough for me to clone it. SSDs have been totally reliable, two Samsungs and two Intels.

SSDs knock spots of any HDD, Ultra SCSI included.

"Death Star" lol, not heard that one - truly diabolical - had one about 6 months before it went us.

14
HOLA4415
Posted

But in SSDs we have:

Buffalo

Corsair

Crucial

Hewlett Packard

IBM

Imation

Intel

Kingston

Maxell

OCZ

PNY

Samsung

Scythe

Verbatim

Western Digital

Just scraped off Novatech site. How many are clones of each other I don't know.

I was going to make the same point: http://www.ssdflashdrivereviews.com/solid-state-disk-manufacturers.php

I suspect the margins on HDDs are close to zero, though this may change now.

15
HOLA4416
Posted

I think my first HDD was a 5Mb Seagate.

I must have been lucky, never had a total HDD failure. I had an IBM "Death Star" that started making knocking noises, but it held together long enough for me to clone it. SSDs have been totally reliable, two Samsungs and two Intels.

SSDs knock spots of any HDD, Ultra SCSI included.

We had quite a few of the dodgy fujitsu's that failed about a decade ago, I ended up finding the PC's which had the dodgy drives in and replaced them.

Never had an IBM death star, but did buy IBM's after that problem and never had an issue with them.

16
HOLA4417
Posted

But I don’t accept that SSDs can replace disks. The storage capacity of disks is almost 1000 times that of SSDs and it isn't only servers that need the capacity

You can pack quite a few SSDs in the space of a disc. Hard discs will be around for a few years yet, but they look fairly likely to fade away in the same way that floppies did, and CDs have come close to doing. The limited number of read / write cycles is probably less of a long-term issue than the life of a hard disc. For most people only price is the issue; there are no real technical disadvantages to SSDs.

17
HOLA4418
Posted

Had a seagate barracuda with the firmware problem - needed to construct a rs232 link using a Nokia ca42 cable with its wires stripped out. A whole weeks work to get that puppy working again.

Never had a problem in 12 years of pc use apart from that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29FztWJVxbM

Check that vid. It's a much simpler version of what I went through. It was my finest hour to get it going again. It's also an awesome vid with Mario sound effects and zelda music. Beautiful.

18
HOLA4419
Posted

In the short term. Longer term hard drives I reckon are dead meat apart from all but the most price sentive and high volume applications like server farms. Goign the same way as the floppy - this one was a monster.

floppy.jpg

Ahh , one of those 8 1/4 inch ones from the late 70s early 80s.I ran across a whole box of them at the dump about 15 years back.

As for the hard drive debate my preference is seagate , have had two WDs fail on me within 6 months of purchase , seagate has been reliable for me.SSD is too early to buy just yet , the technology needs to improve and get cheaper.

19
HOLA4420
Guest eight
Posted

If they charge too much (either through a cartel or just laziness), don't they just open up the market to competition?

You are Bogbrush and I claim my £5.

eight

20
HOLA4421
Posted

I recently bought a couple of 2 TB drives, 1 external (Seagate), 1 internal (WD).

All those downloaded movies and TV shoes, erm... I mean "mission critical data" wouldn't fit on current SSDs.

Not that I'm averse to the idea of an SSD, it's just that prices and the kind of storage I need aren't quite there yet.

21
HOLA4422
Posted

I recently bought a couple of 2 TB drives, 1 external (Seagate), 1 internal (WD).

All those downloaded movies and TV shoes, erm... I mean "mission critical data" wouldn't fit on current SSDs.

Not that I'm averse to the idea of an SSD, it's just that prices and the kind of storage I need aren't quite there yet.

Yes, HDDs still have their uses. Whilst a 160GB SSD is adequate for my day to day requirements on the laptop and my previous 80GB SSD is now in my wife's laptop, I still have a few largish USB HDDs for mass storage.

A nearly full 1TB as overflow to the PVR and a 2.5" 320GB, which I carry on my travels, that holds Acronis backups of the laptops and a hundred or so films copied from the PVR. I also have a 250GB network drive for scheduled incremental backups of the laptops when we are at home.

22
HOLA4423
Posted

Check that vid. It's a much simpler version of what I went through. It was my finest hour to get it going again. It's also an awesome vid with Mario sound effects and zelda music. Beautiful.

Awesome! I realise now, I could have reloaded the firmware in the wife, and avoided an expensive divorce! :blink:

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.




×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information