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0 pointspjc5010y ago0 comments

Loss of reputation isn't a real thing in this industry. Pretty much all hard drive manufacturers have had high-profile "bad" models, for example.

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drzaiusapelord10y ago

Only because up until recently getting in the HD game was prohibitively expensive due to the engineering and capital requirements for designing spinning disks. Now anyone can buy some flash media, a pre-cooked controller firmware, combine the two and sell at competitive rates. There are something like five or six competitive SSD makers right now and many more bottom feeders. There are two competitive spinning disk makers and its been that way for decades, ignoring the occasional small third-party player like Hitachi.

vidarh10y ago

It's a real enough thing that the IBM DeathStar incident [1] [2] was a large factor in making IBM exit the harddisk market (sold off to Hitachi)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST_Deskstar

[2] http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~ken/crash/index.html

pjc50OP10y ago

But they're still in business making hard drives, under the DeskStar name. Seagate had a round of failures at one point. I'm sure there are people out there who've sworn off WD as well.

vidarh10y ago

Who? If you're referring to IBM, then they're not. IBM sold off their entire hard-disk division to Hitachi (which a few years ago sold it off to WD).

If you're referring to Hitachi, then they did continue it, yes, but they bought it on a fire-sale, and their name was not attached to the original affair, so they presumably did not see it as particularly risky.

protomyth10y ago

Is Seagate back to being good? We had 100 drive failures in a batch of 120 HP netbooks, and we had a large number of our server drives go down the tube. I switched to WD at that point.

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drzaiusapelord10y ago

vidarh10y ago

It's a real enough thing that the IBM DeathStar incident [1] [2] was a large factor in making IBM exit the harddisk market (sold off to Hitachi)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST_Deskstar

[2] http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~ken/crash/index.html

pjc50OP10y ago

But they're still in business making hard drives, under the DeskStar name. Seagate had a round of failures at one point. I'm sure there are people out there who've sworn off WD as well.

vidarh10y ago

Who? If you're referring to IBM, then they're not. IBM sold off their entire hard-disk division to Hitachi (which a few years ago sold it off to WD).

protomyth10y ago

Is Seagate back to being good? We had 100 drive failures in a batch of 120 HP netbooks, and we had a large number of our server drives go down the tube. I switched to WD at that point.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse