Samsung Moves its Hard Drive Business over to Seagate
Remember when we used to need to convince average consumers to buy the Barracuda IV hard drive for HTPC usage from Seagate over WD or Maxtor? Well fast forward 8 years, and now Seagate is really trying to take over everyone. For a light 1.4 BILLION dollars, this is pretty big.
There’s quite a bit more to this deal than just Samsung’s HDD business changing hands, though. Here’s a list of the “major elements of the agreement,” in the two companies’ words:
- Samsung combining its hard disk drive (HDD) operations into Seagate
- Extending and enhancing the existing patent cross-license agreement between the companies
- A NAND flash memory supply agreement under which Samsung will provide Seagate with its market-leading semiconductor products for use in Seagate’s enterprise solid state drives (SSDs), solid state hybrid drives and other products
- A disk drive supply agreement under which Seagate will supply disk drives to Samsung for PCs, notebooks and consumer electronics
- Expanded cooperation between the companies to co-develop enterprise storage solutions
- Samsung receiving significant equity ownership in Seagate
- A shareholder agreement under which an executive of Samsung will be nominated to join Seagate’s Board of Directors
Not surprising. Probably
Not surprising. Probably reading the SSD tea leaves.
Wow has the hard drive
Wow has the hard drive business changed since I used to work for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies…….I am glad I am out of that job….
Too bad I started to like
Too bad I started to like Samsung HDD’s. In my experience, they are more reliable and much quieter than HDD’s from other manufacturers.
Please change the title from “it’s” to “its.” “It’s” = it is & “its” is the possessive pronoun.
allston232 wrote:Too bad I
[quote=allston232]
Too bad I started to like Samsung HDD’s. In my experience, they are more reliable and much quieter than HDD’s from other manufacturers.
Please change the title from “it’s” to “its.” “It’s” = it is & “its” is the possessive pronoun.
[/quote]
Good catch, fixed thx
About 6 years ago, I used to
About 6 years ago, I used to only use Samsung HD’s for their reliability and quietness. Then I found their reliability seemed to go down as well as their selection within the product lines. Now, I solely use Western Digital Black & VelociRaptor with desktop and laptop, hard drive replacements. Although they are not the quietest, I find the WD drives, with the available free download of Acronis TrueImage, to be worth the additional cost and trade-offs versus the other drives and their related headaches & seemingly higher failure rates – most notably Seagate drives (probably because they seem to be in all the OEM systems I work on).
I can’t wait until I finally do a SSD build (w/ HDD if needed).
This is starting to shape up
This is starting to shape up like the defense industry. Remember when there used to be hundreds of defense contractors but now there are only three or four big players that scarfed up all of the smaller competitors? Maxtor bought out Quantum, then Seagate bought out Maxtor and now Seagate acquires Samsung (not sure whatever happened to Micropolis other than they just faded away). Western Digital and Hitachi/IBM seem to be the last major holdouts, although I’m not sure if Toshiba is still in the game (I believe they made laptop drives for a while).
WD is acquiring Hitachi.
WD is acquiring Hitachi.
This is a bit surprising,
This is a bit surprising, Samsung is such a big player in the NAND game I would have thought that they’d be interested in making a run at the SSD hard drive crown on their own.
Great move for Seagate though, I think they are really onto something with their hybrid drives (4GB SSD + 500 GB platter).