Seagate buys up Samsung HDD division for $1.375 billion

After searching for buyers of its money-losing HDD division, Samsung has announced today that Seagate has taken the business for $1.375 billion, in a cash-and-stock transaction.

Seagate is the largest HDD manufacturer in the world.

As part of the deal, Samsung gets a 9.6 percent ownership stake in Seagate.

Seagate, for its part, will become the sole provider for HDD in Samsung PCs, notebooks, NAS and DVR alongside the extension of a number of cross-license agreements.

Additionally, Seagate now has a guaranteed supply of NAND flash memory for SSD, a huge bonus for the drive maker.

Just last month, Western Digital purchased Hitachi's HDD business for $4.25 billion, as the market continues to consolidate.

Says Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and CEO:

We are pleased to strengthen our strategic relationship with Samsung in a way that better aligns both companies around technologies and products. With these agreements, we expect to achieve greater scale and deliver a broader range of innovative storage products and solutions to our customers, while facilitating our long-term relationship with Samsung.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 19 Apr 2011 12:52

KillerBug

Crap...Samsung and WD drives always give me grief...who will I buy hard drives from now?

19.4.2011 14:44 #1

xyqo

Originally posted by KillerBug: Crap...Samsung and WD drives always give me grief...who will I buy hard drives from now? Yeh same here... sigh ... I miss Maxtor :(

XXYYQQOO!!! Yeah WELCOME TO JAMROCK

19.4.2011 15:32 #2

patrick_

first Hitachi, now Samsung, no good ones left :(

20.4.2011 04:47 #3

JGJD2001

Originally posted by xyqo: Originally posted by KillerBug: Crap...Samsung and WD drives always give me grief...who will I buy hard drives from now? Yeh same here... sigh ... I miss Maxtor :( you do know that seagate aquired maxtor ?

probably why seagates are a lil more realiable then they used to be.

interesting to see how SSD drives now will come out....hopefully a massive price drop :D

20.4.2011 08:29 #4

plazma247

Actually JGJD2001, Prior to getting Maxtor, Seagate had a real reliability issue, i worked in an rma dept at the time, as more and more Seagate drives failed, they came packaged better and better as Seagate initially blamed excessive knocks in transport.

After about a year or so of this Seagate introduce the fluid bearing technology to all the new drives being produced.

*NOTE. I remember this time, i was so sick of Seagate hard drives i didn't even test them. Instead i used to spin them up, give the drive a knock and terminally crash the heads (lol saved me 2 hours of test time per drive lol) and rma them as a complete head crash. Then the fluid bearing technology drives came in, just to test how good they really I tried to kill a good one just for fun. After throwing it across the room for the third time (old drives couldn't take a 1ft drop) and it starting to develop a new noise it still worked and I got board and killed it off with fully by blowing the drive interface with 12v so we could rma it back. Yeah I know all very naughty tricks but... what can I say we were young and free and nothing really mattered back then... anyway I digress back to the story...

This changed history for Seagate, they now were and have been since one of the most reliable drives.

Now having a very very low failure rate would mean that Seagate could keep the price cheap and kill the profit margin for other manufactures that had most costs required to support higher failure rates.

Of course as you become less popular that price needs to drop further to continue selling.

Maxtor reached a breaking point and eventually got acquired by Seagate, who initially let the plants carry on as they were branding as maxtor on the existing product line. Once the lines were done, seagate gave them production of all the lower spec drives for a while, limiting the cache etc to produce budget drives to fight on one front and allowed seagate to still fight off the cheaper competitors whilst preserving the seagate name (brands quality image).

Eventually seagate decide its not making good sense running two hard disk devisions and decides to bring it all under the seagate brand.

Now they have just purchases (aquired) samsungs hard drive business...

Personally if i was Seagate my biggest concern for the future was to try and keep up top and survive to impending growth of SSD technology as it starts to mature. Magnetic Drives will be around for a while yet, but im pretty sure that SSD tech is going continue to get cheaper/larger capacity.

Additionally, many users, be it at the moment largely office user store less and less data on workstations and laptops and raided shared servers are the norm, here SSD tech means users get much better system performance as all large data retention is over the lan.

Now im seeing more and more friends like myself creating home nas/server systems for personal and family data to home networks to get the data to multiple devices and patrons, again this means the requirement for large storage dwindles and SSD becomes more favourable.

Myself i already offer an upgrade on all desktops i make to have all boot and programs loading from SSD and a magnetic drive purely for data retention.

21.4.2011 04:41 #5

DXR88

I think Seagate's Hybrid HDD is going somewhere.

22.4.2011 19:44 #6

plazma247

If you ask me hybrid drives are not worth it, it either is or it isnt ssd to me, although i would like to get my hands on to test one full, to me a h-hdd is just readyboost for hard disks... and that worked well.

23.4.2011 03:38 #7

DXR88

Originally posted by plazma247: If you ask me hybrid drives are not worth it, it either is or it isnt ssd to me, although i would like to get my hands on to test one full, to me a h-hdd is just readyboost for hard disks... and that worked well.

HHDD's have the latency of a 10,000rpm hard drive at a fraction of the cost, not to mention the design has the potential to be a great performance booster. SSD's are simply too small vs the price ratio.

24.4.2011 14:59 #8

plazma247

Originally posted by DXR88: Originally posted by plazma247: If you ask me hybrid drives are not worth it, it either is or it isnt ssd to me, although i would like to get my hands on to test one full, to me a h-hdd is just readyboost for hard disks... and that worked well.

HHDD's have the latency of a 10,000rpm hard drive at a fraction of the cost, not to mention the design has the potential to be a great performance booster. SSD's are simply too small vs the price ratio. Depends on what your using it for, if you want it for past applications and boot a pure ssd is better. For storing vast amounts of data as cheap as possible would be a classic hard disk.

HHDD only really have a home in laptops to me where there is no viable option for a second drive, probably why the first ones were only aimed at oem laptop suppliers.

Personally looking at the price of the HHDD drives i think i will stick with a Small SSD + Standard Disk (have better redundancy and more space/speed for my money) !!

24.4.2011 16:27 #9

hermes_vb

Originally posted by patrick_: first Hitachi, now Samsung, no good ones left :( My thoughts exactly. You can also add Maxtor to that list.

If I always hear voices surrounding me, does it mean I'm crazy or that I hear in Dolby 5.1?

30.4.2011 01:12 #10

SProdigy

Originally posted by hermes_vb: Originally posted by patrick_: first Hitachi, now Samsung, no good ones left :( My thoughts exactly. You can also add Maxtor to that list. Samsungs had a high failure rate and were the main cause of HP machines going haywire.

30.4.2011 01:23 #11

hermes_vb

Originally posted by SProdigy: Originally posted by hermes_vb: Originally posted by patrick_: first Hitachi, now Samsung, no good ones left :( My thoughts exactly. You can also add Maxtor to that list. Samsungs had a high failure rate and were the main cause of HP machines going haywire.

I never had a problem with Samsung's laptop drives. Maybe I got lucky.

If I always hear voices surrounding me, does it mean I'm crazy or that I hear in Dolby 5.1?

30.4.2011 01:36 #12

smtjs

Another good drive swallowed up by Crapgate.

30.4.2011 20:11 #13

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