Monday, April 18th 2011

Samsung Electronics Exiting HDD Business, Seagate Front-runner to Buy It

by
btarunr
 Discuss (61 Comments)
Korean multinational conglomerate Samsung is planning to sell its hard disk drive (HDD) business held by Samsung Electronics. The company wants to focus on other kinds of storage products that are flash-based. Samsung is planning to sell the unit for an estimated US $1.5 billion. HDD major Seagate Technology is the front-runner to buy it. The HDD industry is under pressure after the market success of tablet and netbook industries, which use more compact and inexpensive SSDs instead of 1.8-inch HDDs. With Samsung's exit, the consumer HDD industry will be reduced to just three players: Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba.
Source: Wall Street Journal

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61 Comments on Samsung Electronics Exiting HDD Business, Seagate Front-runner to Buy It

#51
suraswami
Going to miss Samsung HDDs. They are great HDDs, fast, quiet, absolute no vibration not like the crappy WD Blues. Even the 5400 RPM 1TB drives match up the speed of few 7200 RPM drives. hmm I am going to pick up few more Samsung drives before they are history.

Hopefully Seagate keeps the Samsung tech and continues to build products based on that.
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#52
Soylent Joe
That's a damn shame. I've heard great things about their F3 & F4 drives.

But yeah, keep on weeding out the competition until there's just one or two manufacturers who can set their own prices. Perfect. Happens with everything else.
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#53
turtile
FourstaffThey just bought Hitachi, so I don't think they are ready to buy again.
...and Hitachi has high performance drives that will allow WD to enter into a new market. I don't see much of an advantage to Seagate either.
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#54
TheLaughingMan
turtile...and Hitachi has high performance drives that will allow WD to enter into a new market. I don't see much of an advantage to Seagate either.
Hitachi in a HDD market that WD wasn't? Which one?

The advantage is gaining their factories, patented HDD technology, possible brand. At the very least, they will be able to product more drives and take a chunk of Samsung's current HDD customers. Not to mention some of the tech will help Seagate catch up on density per platter. One of the many reasons the F3 and F4 are as fast as they are for standard HDD's and an area Seagate fell behind on.

Oh well. I guess I will wait to see what a Samsung SSD turns out to be. We could get a new controller or NAND memory out of this. Both things Samsung is capable of making.
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#55
Mussels
Freshwater Moderator
TheLaughingManHitachi in a HDD market that WD wasn't? Which one?

The advantage is gaining their factories, patented HDD technology, possible brand. At the very least, they will be able to product more drives and take a chunk of Samsung's current HDD customers. Not to mention some of the tech will help Seagate catch up on density per platter. One of the many reasons the F3 and F4 are as fast as they are for standard HDD's and an area Seagate fell behind on.

Oh well. I guess I will wait to see what a Samsung SSD turns out to be. We could get a new controller or NAND memory out of this. Both things Samsung is capable of making.
iirc, hitachi had really high speed SAS drives for the enterprise market.
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#56
btarunr
Editor & Senior Moderator
Jonap_1sti smell it this is just the beginning that HDD will be like floppy disk in decades..
Give me an SSD that does 500 MB/s, has HDD-like rewrite cycle life, 3 TB in capacity, and costs $100. Until then.
Posted on Reply
#57
slyfox2151
btarunrGive me an SSD that does 500 MB/s, has HDD-like rewrite cycle life, 3 TB in capacity, and costs $100. Until then.
i give it 6 - 10 years :D
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#58
FreedomEclipse
~Technological Technocrat~
If anyone in the UK want to grab some more Spinpoint F3's before they are all sold out, Play.com is currently the cheapest place. but there have been some complaints about how play.com shipped the HDD. one buyer said he recieved the drive in a jiffy bag - no extra padding or anything. luckily it still worked
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#59
TheLaughingMan
FreedomEclipseIf anyone in the UK want to grab some more Spinpoint F3's before they are all sold out, Play.com is currently the cheapest place. but there have been some complaints about how play.com shipped the HDD. one buyer said he recieved the drive in a jiffy bag - no extra padding or anything. luckily it still worked
They aren't going to disappear over night. There is a lot of legal work to take care of first. Sammy will still be making HDD's for a while yet. They may disappear before the end of this year.
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#60
KyleReese
Nooooooooooooo......I am soooo sad...!!! I have a Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB and it performs BETTER than two of my WD in Raid 0!!!! I can only imagine how the F3s and F4s perform....I don't know why, I never saw this coming...with the quality of Samsung has on the hard drives I thought it would never close down...I should have bought a couple when I had a chance...now it's too late... :( I can't find them anywhere in my country :cry:
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#61
micropage7
thats kinda sad, but sooner or later it looks gonna change into ssd :wtf:
yeah the waves change :shadedshu
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