Disk drive BIGNESS is back: Seagate revenues and shipments surge Growth has returned to the disk drive business if Seagate's latest quarterly results are anything to go by. The raw numbers paint the picture perfectly. First quarter fiscal 2015 revenues were $3.8bn, nine per cent up on an annual compare and 15 per cent higher than the previous quarter. Seagate shipped 59.5 million drives, up …
Seagate used to be my go to business for HD. But in the last three years WD and Seagate drives have been failing on me way too much. I found Hitachi HGST drives to be more stable and error free over the long term. I even use them in my home NAS.
I am not employed in any way by Hitachi, nor do I have any stake, stock, or interest in their business. This opinion is my own.
Seems a strangely non-contentious post to be downvoted!
I've had no problems with Seagate or WD. My problems were all with Samsung - 5 out of 6 drives failed in under 12 months. Just threw the survivor out.
My problem with Seagate is that any warranty returns have to be sent to the Netherlands - cheaper just to replace the drive, but I guess that's the idea. I do like their easily stacked external USB drives though.
Fair enough, I guess I should explain why I downvoted this post - I sell a lot of hard drives.
Hard drives go wrong frequently. All brands, all capacities, they all have a failure rate much higher than most computer parts.
Therefore there are lots of people out there who have had failed drives. And since there are so many hard drives made, and so many people buy them, there are many people who have had failures that, taken in isolation, make it look like one manufacturer is much worse or better than others.
So there are people out there who have owned a dozen Seagate drives and a dozen WD drives, and all the WDs have failed within a year, and all the Seagates still work. When considered with all the data on all the drives out there, this is to be expected. However its the people who get the statistical freaks who, quite naturally, post about it on the internet.
Which from my point of view means that whenever I get a customer with a failed drive, I have to deal with "I searched on the internet and found that everyone is complaining about $drive_manufacturer". Which is why I downvoted the parent comment - I completely believe the post is 100% truthful, but I know for a fact that it is nevertheless misleading.
Oh, I missed this: "My problem with Seagate is that any warranty returns have to be sent to the Netherlands"
I don't have a Seagate drive serial number to hand to check, but I'm about 99% sure this isn't correct - there's a choice over where you want to send it back to, including a UK address, I think the Netherlands is the default option. Its a while since I returned one through their site myself, but I'd be shocked if the UK option is no longer there.
3 out of the last 4 hard drive failures that I've experienced were Seagate drives, and the drives aren't that old, but I don't have a lot of drives and that could be a statistical fluke.
For real data, you need a large population, like what Backblaze has done. For Backblaze's usage, Seagate is still economical because their per-TB costs are low enough to cover the failures, but I don't have that luxury.
Hitachi is now the reliable-drives arm of Western Digital. There are only 3 hard drive manufacturers left on this planet: Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba.
I think hard drives suck, but all digital storage technologies suck, so the only reasonable option is to have multiple copies with automatic backup and verification. Like RAID-Z with snapshots and replicas.
"Hitachi is now the reliable-drives arm of Western Digital"
Sorta, but Hitachi sold the business and it became HGST (a Western Digital Company) and it's totally nothing to do with Hitachi any more.
Also, WD and HGST's drive plants and designs are completely separate and can really be counted as two separate manufacturing entities.
"Can anyone explain to me why this is not the sign of a cartel ?"
Coupled with rapidly shrinking warranties and making it harder to make warranty claims: Nope.
What I can explain is that it's a good sign that HDD makers are facing going down the shitter as SSDs take off.
3d tech on 40nm means that older fabs can turn out the required NAND, which in turn means there's a hell of a lot of capacity out there about to hit the market.
"nine per cent up on an annual compare"
"Seagate's total capacity ship growth"
What is it with The Register and these newfangled hipster usages? Has the use of verbs in lieu of nouns recently been written into the El Reg Style Guide or something?
This usage is not only erroneous, but pretentious. El Reg has been a stalwart defender of proper English for most of the 15+ years that I've been a reader, but lately y'all have been puttin' on airs!
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