Segate buys Maxtor

[Shockeye]

Seagate says to buy Maxtor for $1.9 bln in stock

Wed Dec 21, 2005 05:11 AM ET

NEW YORK, Dec 21 (Reuters) - Seagate Technology (STX.N: Quote, Profile, Research) on Wednesday said it would buy rival computer disk-drive maker Maxtor Corp. (MXO.N: Quote, Profile, Research) for $1.9 billion in stock.

Under terms of the deal, which is expected to be completed in the second half of 2006, Maxtor shareholders will receive 0.37 shares of Seagate common stock for each Maxtor share they own. Seagate shareholders will own about 84 percent and Maxtor shareholders will own about 16 percent of the new combined company.

The combination is expected to add 10 to 20 percent to Seagate's cash earnings per share after the first full year of joint operations, Seagate said in a release.

Seagate said its executive management team will continue to serve in their current roles and the combined company will retain the Seagate name.

Since the IBM hard drive fiasco a few years back, the only hard drives I've bought are Seagate or Maxtor. I've found both companies to produce good quality drives and hopefully that trend will continue in the future once the merger is complete.

[HaemishM]

Bah, the Hitachi Deskstar (?) series of Hard drives that the IBM drives became are damn good drives. I have two SATA ones in my new computer and they work great.

But Maxtor has been good lately too, as opposed to the shit they were in the early 90's.

[Ironwood]

Yeah, but the real question is 'will the quality continue to be high now that they're not competing'.  Stay tuned.

[Yegolev]

Well, Hitachi and WD are still out there, so no need to panic yet.

[Sky]

I always had good experience with the IBM Deskstars. I use Seagates preferentially right now, the 7200.7 and .8, specifically. Quiet and decent speed.

[Yegolev]

I remember the old days of "stiction" with IBM drives.  They would just stop spinning. The fix was to give it a whack.  No, really, that was the official IBM fix that you would get when you called the CE out to work on your dead server.  That was in the early 1990's though.  The IBM DASD are much better now, especially since they are competing (or think they are) with EMC.

[WayAbvPar]

I had a Maxtor drive fail on me recently- it was still covered under warranty, so the shop I bought it from replaced it with a Seagate with the same specs.

[Strazos]

WD for me.

[Hoax]

Yeah most recent drive I have purchased was one of WD's raptor sata drives.  By the by I was thinking of getting a 100+ external HD anyone have one they would hands down recommend?

[Sky]

I've been using a 120GB external FW Iomega drive with the macs (for troubleshoot boots and imaging) for the last year, it's been a champ. Our server backs up to external FW Maxtors. Solid for three years now, probably going to replace them in '06 (to avoid problems). But they've been solid through multiGB backups every night.

[Hanzii]

And don't forget Samsung.
Their drives used to be noisy, but now they're up there with the rest.

[Sky]

The last internal Maxtor I bought (from Staples in emergency mode) was loud. It also failed a couple days after it's year warranty was up.

[Righ]

What's with all this manufacturer favoritism people? You HAVE to be old enough to know that there were years of shitty Deskstars (such that people called them Deathstars) as well as years of great ones. There were Seagates with sticking problems, Maxtors with bearings that screamed before they self-destructed, WDs with head problems, Hitachis with controller failures, etc. All these companies make good drives. They also make lemons. You need to know the drive type and the year, then you need to nose around the sites frequented by people with data centers with tens of thousands of drives.

[schild]

All these companies make good drives. They also make lemons. You need to know the drive type and the year, then you need to nose around the sites frequented by people with data centers with tens of thousands of drives.

I have 4 different hard drives attached to my current computer. A Hitachi, a Maxtor, an Acom Data, and a Western Digital. They are all drives from different years. Some are very big, one is very tiny (10 gigs, my Windows drive). I do not think that these are worries worth having anymore. Companies (even the no name ones) make decent hard drives now. IOW, I have no manufacturer favoritism. Find me the biggest / fastest / best price per gig drive and I don't care if it's made by Shitty Company, LLC. of North Korea.

[Trippy]

What's with all this manufacturer favoritism people? You HAVE to be old enough to know that there were years of shitty Deskstars (such that people called them Deathstars) as well as years of great ones. There were Seagates with sticking problems, Maxtors with bearings that screamed before they self-destructed, WDs with head problems, Hitachis with controller failures, etc. All these companies make good drives. They also make lemons. You need to know the drive type and the year, then you need to nose around the sites frequented by people with data centers with tens of thousands of drives.

I generally buy hard drives based on a balance of speed, size, quietness, and warranty length. I've talked about this before in other threads but I used to be a loyal IBM hard drive customer since their 1 GB "Peagsus" SCSI drive days and I never ended up with one of their Deathstars but I stopped buying IBM (and now Hitachi) drives because of the crappy way they treated customers -- or more specifically the way they totally ignored the problem. Why should I continue to buy drives from a manufacturer that doesn't stand behind their products? Since that time, Maxtor has been my preferred brand since they had the best balance of the above (Seagates were too slow, Western Digital were too loud before they finally started using FDB), and my newest computer has a couple of MaxLine IIIs in them but I also have some newer Seagates and one Western Digital drive as well.

[Shockeye]

I had two "Deathstar" drives and I refuse to buy another IBM or Hitachi drive since then. I had a few Maxtors that worked very well and lately I've been buying Seagate SATA drives. Again, no problems.

[Hoax]

Ok, so basically go with god?

Thanks guys, really narrowed it down for me.

[Trippy]

Ok, so basically go with god?

Thanks guys, really narrowed it down for me.

Pretty much. The simple answer is go with a manufacturer whose drives you like. All the major manufacturers except for Hitachi make external drive versions. If you need a high performance external drive, make sure you get a 7200 RPM one (read the box/specs carefully). On the PC side the standard interface is USB 2.0 but some have dual USB 2.0 and Firewire (typically the 400 version, not the 800). The external drives from tne major manufacturers come with some sort of backup program and are usually semi-automated by pushing a button on the front of the drive ("one touch backup") but I've never used that so I can't comment one which manufacturer bundles the best software for that sort of thing.

I have two Seagates and a Western Digital external drive plus a couple of random external cases that I bought separately. Out of the three name brand external drives, only one of the Seagates actually works "correctly" (to my mind). The Western Digital drive I have to turn off by unplugging the power connector (for some reason the "on" button doesn't also turn it off). The other Seagate I have to turn on and off by flipping the on off switch in the back which is hard to get to. The lone "working" Seagate drive can be powered on and off by a button in front. The Seagates also have a weird curvy shape and are not designed to stack on top of each other and if you try that they sort of twist and move around since there are no grooves or anything for the feet to fit into.