Seagate to buy Maxtor for $1.9 Billion!

[Gurm]

All drives go through bad periods.

For Maxtor, it was the 8GB-20GB period. I have never seen such a bad run of drives as the 13GB Maxtors. And they died spectacularly. Every single one we sold at my shop... came back going ZZZZZZZ-CLICK! ZZZZZZZZZ-CLICK!

But WD has had bad runs. Seagate had a run around that same time (10GB or so) that would just ... lose ... files. Like you'd run fine for a day or two and then your machine would crash because half your windows directory was ... missing. An entire batch did that.

WDD has issues off and on.

Then there's that "Deathstar" thing.

Samsung gets my money nowadays, but a few years back they were garbage.

[Nowhere]

So...I wonder why IBM was the only one who has/had constant bashing after one "bad run"...

[Dr Mordrid]

The higher a pedestal you put yourself on the further you fall

Dr. Mordrid

[Jammrock]

So...I wonder why IBM was the only one who has/had constant bashing after one "bad run"...

Because Hitachi has kept the tradition alive. The Hitachi Flying Deahstars (TravelStars) are utter shite. I replace 3-4 bad travelstars a months ... personally. The desktop drive I hear have recovered from IBMs debacle, but so far the laptop hard drives have not, imo.

And in case you were wondering ... some of these Flying Deathstars I've been replacing are well under 1 year old.

[TnT]

I guess bad drives from specific companies always seek out specific people. People such as Doc get the bad Seagates, people like Claymonkey get bad Maxtors. It evens itself out at the end!

I personally was an IBM drive guy until Seagate drives got really quiet. I have one Maxtor which was too cheap to pass up at the time and it is significantly louder than my other drives.

[Mehen]

I'd like to hear thoughts on whether anyone sees flash memory taking over a portion of consumer mass (ie in 200gb-400gb ish amounts) storage in the next few years.

Harddrive aren't really keeping up with the speeds of everything else in pc's (and they fail ), other than storage size.

[Dr Mordrid]

Flash is already appearing in higher end in video cameras, so it working down the line is to be expected.

Dr. Mordrid

[Jammrock]

I'd like to hear thoughts on whether anyone sees flash memory taking over a portion of consumer mass (ie in 200gb-400gb ish amounts) storage in the next few years.

Harddrive aren't really keeping up with the speeds of everything else in pc's (and they fail ), other than storage size.

All the big RAM/storage makers are rushing to be the first on the block with a (relatively) cheap solid state storage solution. IBM and Infineon of working hard on getting MRAM (or MagRAM, Magnetic RAM, completely non-volitile and as fast or faster than SDRAM). Samsung has their NAND flash, and will be releasing hybrid HDDs next year - regular HDDs with 128 MB, 256 MB, and eventually more integrated onto the controller, that stores the OS boot up and operational files, and the needed files for your most commonly used applications.

I've heard of some other obscure non-volitile solutions in the work. MRAM looks to be the most promising, IMO. Preliminary specs indicate that it won't have the write limits that traditional flash based memory has. IBM says cell phones and other small devices should start getting MRAM treatments in 2006 or 2007, and they expect to have a PC solution by 2010.

Time will tell though. But I see 2010 as a more realistic timeline for it to happen in the consumer sector.

[Dr Mordrid]

Holographic discs will be coming this year from Hitachi-Maxell and InPhase. Already been tested on the air on the Turner Classic Movies cable/satellite channel. Part of their tech is using stationary data cards and not rotating discs.

Dr. Mordrid

[Liquid Snake]

Well there's still Samsung. No one seems to pay much attention to them though, except the silent PC crowd.

[Mcollector]

So...I wonder why IBM was the only one who has/had constant bashing after one "bad run"...

Because slimey IBM managers tried to hide it, and quietly dump the marginal drives into some mass market consumer channel. Like maybe Fry's. Heard a rumor that Fry's buys a lot of seconds. Sure explains some problems I had with a Turtle Beach Montego II sound card and an ATI Always Wonder Pro (Rage Pro incantation) I got from them.

btw, I had a 5-year-warranty IBM 36G, 10K rpm, U160 SCSI drive fail in a SOHO server box a few months back. Hitachi sent a replacement HDD (looked exactly like the bad one, except it had a sticker that said Hitachi). It was not yet 3 years old when it failed.

[Claymonkey]

So...I wonder why IBM was the only one who has/had constant bashing after one "bad run"...

well remember when their run went bad IBM was the top of the heap and everyone built with them and recommended them. There was a lot more faith in IBM across the board then I ever remember ever happening before or since with a HD manufacturer. Then you have one of the biggest failure rates EVER...

[Mcollector]

Very true, Claymonkey. Excellent observations.

[Dr Mordrid]

I had 6 go bad on me witihin a few weeks.

I was not a happy camper

Dr. Mordsrid