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back to article Bombshell in platterland: WD tried to buy Seagate

Bloomberg let off a mini-bombshell yesterday: Western Digital apparently offered to buy Seagate in October. At the time, world number one (by revenue) hard disk drive manufacturer Seagate was in the midst of resumed discussions with private equity buyers – led by TPG Capital – to go private. This is after initial discussions …

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  1. Mage Silver badge

    HDD more battery?

    I don't think so.

    Expensive SSD is faster than HDD

    Cheap SSD much slower to write than HDD, though faster to read.

    If HDD is single process/user it can be as fast as SSD. If multiprocess/user then SSD wins by wide margin unless the HDD is about 6x drives HW RAID 5. (random access speed poor on signel drive)

    160G HDD is less power in Notebook/laptop than SSD same size.

    Boot time more affected by OS than storage:

    on Same Laptop

    XP 12s

    Vista 50s

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  2. ArmanX
    Thumb Up

    I'm wondering if the bid was expected to be refused...

    It makes sense that it was there just to throw a wrench in the works.

    I'm not terribly worried - I've had good luck with WD hard drives, and very poor luck with Seagate. If Seagate slips to #2, I won't have a problem with it.

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    1. Steve Roper
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      Thumb Up

      Seagate vs WD

      I have an interesting situation with these two HDD manufacturers. Like you, I'm a WD man. I've bought 4 Seagate drives in the past and ALL 4 have failed within 6 months, so now I won't touch them with a pole. I've owned a dozen or more WD drives, and not one has ever failed or gone faulty on me.

      Yet a friend of mine has bought three WD drives in the last few years and they've all died on him in the first year - and he's never had any problems with Seagate drives. As you might expect, he's a Seagate man.

      I find it strange that we should have such radically different experiences with these manufacturers' drives, but it does lend credence to each fans' support of their favourite brand!

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  3. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

    What about my backups?

    I make backups on two USB hard disks - from different manufacturers. If there aren't any different manufacturers then I have a problem!

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    1. Ammaross Danan
      Reply Icon
      FAIL

      Backups

      Since you're likely storing both of those drives on your desk at home, I would suggest where you store your drives will be more important that the company that manufactured them. It's unlikely that two drives from the same company (same batch even) will die at the exact same time AND your primary computer dying as well.

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  4. Inachu
    FAIL

    Ewww! BAD MOVE WD!

    Seagate drives are noisy even when new and MTBF for a seagate is shorter than a WD drive.

    So I do not know why WD would buy such bad drives.

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    1. Eddie Johnson
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      WTF?

      MTBF = Lies + Statistics

      MTBF figures are a complete joke anyway. If any of them were close to realistic most of us would never see a hard drive fail.

      A 400,000 hour MTBF is 45 years of 24/7/365 usage. Even assuming half the drives fail before that the failure rate before 10 years should be tiny. Considering that probably no drive has ever lasted 40 years how can they publish this BS?

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      1. Steven Jones
        Reply Icon

        MTBF misunderstanding

        This is a common misunderstanding of MTBF. An MTBF figure tells you nothing about the lifetime of a particular product. The MTBF figure and service lifetime are two completely different things. What the MTBF tells you is how many failures should be expected, on average, for a given number of operational hours. If you have 1,000 disks and operate them for 8,000 hours, then that's 8,000,000 operational hours. If the disks have an MTBF of 400,000 hours then you would expect about 20 failures.

        However, that doesn't tell you anything about the service lifetime of the drives. You might find those MTBF numbers are only valid for the first 50,000 operational hours (a little over 5 years of continuous operation) and then the MTBF markedly worsens and almost none are still operable in 100,000 hours (by which time they will be well and truly obsolete of course).

        There are lots of things wrong with MTBFs and the stats from disk manufacturers. They won't generally tell you service lives (which they probably won't know anyway. as they'd only accelerated ageing to test) and, as some studies have found, batch-to-batch variations can be enormous.

        But people should never equate MTBF with service life - they are completely different things.

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Neither company impresses

    Recent product offerings from both companies have been dismal IMO. It's like the blind leading the dumb...

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Troll

    big fish little fish

    seagate ate something bad, (maxtor) which seems to have made them kind of ill.

    If WD had eaten seagate, I wonder if the poison would have continued to spread.

    we could have been left with a choice between Samsung and Hitachi.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Linux

      Re: SSD will eat all of them

      "Why does my company buy SAS/FC HDD for our databases? it is way cheaper to buy SSDs and put them in raid 5 than buying more oracle licenses."

      Any moment now, Larry will introduce SSD-based pricing for his licences. "That'll be $LOTS per CPU per client per application per SSD per GB per weekday per fetish! Why are you grimacing? I'm hardly squeezing them at all!"

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  8. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    "SDD development assets"

    Sorry if I am undereducated - but I'm not sure what these are?

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