Seagate writes off $2.2bn Maxtor goodwill

TalkBack 1 of 5:

Next »

• Thread View
• Flat View

Seagate is using Maxtor brand for lower quality drives

Maxtor never had a very good reputation, although I have had some Maxtor drives that lasted (I still have two 40GB drives that work), but it seems like Maxtor had continuing quality control problems and lots of complaints, and ran the company into the ground. After Seagate bought Maxtor, they dumped Maxtor's drive designs and used the same drive designs for both brands. All hard drives are different, they are like CPUs where some are better than others due to manufacturing variances. All drive makers employ pretty sophisticated statistical models to predict what their drive failure rate will be. They make their drives only just good enough to surive the warranty period, it's manadatory in a cut-throat market like this. I think Seagate just sorts the drives and the lower quality ones get branded as Maxtor, with a three year warranty, and the higher quality drives get branded as Seagate with a five year warranty. This way they can sell some lower quality drives as Maxtor, instead of scrapping them. This is analogous to AMD selling Phenom CPUs with some the cores disabled as lower class chips, at a lower prices, instead of scrapping them.

Posted by: cjc5447   Posted on: 02/03/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now
• Virtualization: Architectural Considerations And Other Evaluation Criteria VMware Of the many approaches to x86 systems virtualization available in the ... Download Now
• Reducing Server Total Cost of Ownership with VMware Virtualization Software VMware VMware virtualization enables customers to reduce their server TCO and ... Download Now