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
From a technicians perspective all drives fail. I run recoveries on more greens/blue 3.5" WD's than anything else, then WD 2.5" drives (most of those are ship out for a clean room) and that followed by the seagate 500GB slim 2.5" drives.
And I was actually able to recover the data off that drive by banging it during power cycle to free the jammed mechanicals, can't do that with a bricked SSD.
HDDs are around 50-60y old. They've had more than enough time to perfect the technology and manufacturing process.
Just bought 2 WD 3½" blue 500's & 2 blue 1 T's for $38 & $44 (each) respectively. (<-from Frys promo codes) Screw the price hikes!!
I guess to get rock solid reliability drives will have to cost at least twice as much, and by this I mean actually adding real technology to the drives.
However nowadays manufacturers just create the sensation of premium with high warranty at double the price but in fact from that extra price they just cover the higher RMA rates due to extended warranty, and deliver mostly the same shitty drives.
It could also be that we as humans don't control yet the technology so well ... and everything we do has a high rate of failure to begin with, but that is a story for another day.