Monday, January 16th 2017
Seagate is Shutting Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants
The woes for the trusty old HDD continue, as Seagate, one of the world's biggest players on the HDD manufacturing field, has confirmed they are closing up one of their largest plants. The factory, located in Suzhou, China, is one of the company's largest HDD production epicenters, and its closure will significantly reduce the company's HDD output - a step in the company's purported "optimizations" towards reducing their HDD production capabilities from 55-60 million HDDs per quarter to around 35-40 million. Production and demand's age-old feud are once again taking their toll, as demand for spindle-drive technology subsides on the wake of SSDs increased performance and consecutive price declines, with most laptops now shipping with either SSD-based storage or cheaper, yet less power-hungry, eMMC solutions.
As a result, Seagate intends to lay off ~2200 employees, which go on to join the ~8,000 employees already laid-off in 2016 from different locations. It is still unclear what the company intends to do with the facility, which it obtained as part of Maxtor's assets, when it acquired the company in 2006, though a full-scale conversion to SSD manufacturing is unlikely any time soon, considering the amount of machinery that would have to be replaced on such a large factory.
65 Comments on Seagate is Shutting Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants
When HGST owned them, they were effectively Ultrastar drives that failed the enterprise tests in some way. I have no idea what Toshiba is doing though.
Of course I've had issues with WD too, a while back bought a WD Green drive back when they came with 5 year warranties, within the first year started having issues, did a disk repair seemed to fix it, eventually I did have to RMA, got a refurbished drive which worked fine, of course after the first drive started failing I discovered that the drives apparently had an issue with head parking.
Long story short HDD don't last anywhere near as long as they use to, and HDD prices may go up because of this.WD?
WD kept the server Ultrastar 3.5" line, and the Travelstar 2.5" line.
HDD Prices STILL haven't returned to normal after the 2011 floods and now this is only going to drive them higher, I'm almost tempted to think they are doing this deliberately to drive up prices >.>
They refused to do anything more. Which is why I never buy wd products anymore.
i use it for instaling games.
And i loking for replacement 2tb drive there is cheaper Toshiba and then the new ones Segate Barracuda
Luckily, most of mine keep on truckin long after SMART says they shouldn't.
Like CPU and GPU manufacturers, there are very few HDD manufacturers nowadays. As long as you can have what appears to be a decent market share (at least 25-30%), you can claim to be amongst the top... even if there are only two other competitors and they both have more market share than you. It's like the spin doctors are trying to make people think it's still 1990 when everyone and their mothers were still making x86 CPUs.
Although in Seagate's case, it helps that Western Digital's reputation isn't that far off among some and that Toshiba barely exists as a third choice. Ah, the joys of oligopoly....