The once cluttered hard drive market isn't so cluttered anymore. Back in 2000, Maxtor purchased Quantum's hard disk business, primarily for the company's ATA133 IDE interface. Then in 2006, Seagate scooped up Maxtor. A little more recently, Western Digital picked up Hitachi's storage division, giving WD a 50 percent share of the market. Seagate responded by snatching Samsung's HDD business as part of a "broad strategic alignment" between the two. So which company now wields the largest share of the HDD market?
Just when you though mechanical hard drives were starting to go out of style in favor of SSDs, Seagate went and did something that's drumming up a bit of excitement in the storage space. The hard drive maker broke the areal density barrier by announcing the world's first 3.5-inch HDD featuring 1TB of storage capacity per disk platter. Seagate's accomplishment should pave the way for more capacious and higher performing hard drives.
As of today it's official, Samsung is out of the hard drive business and significantly richer as a result. Samsung reportedly hoped to pull in $1.5 billion but was willing to entertain offers below $1 billion. Turns out the company didn't have to, as Seagate stepped up to the plate with a $1.375 billion offer, half of which it will pay in cash and the other half in stock. Samsung will also receive a 9.6 percent stake in Seagate, but there's more to this deal than hard drives, cash, and stock.
So long as hard drive makers continue to push the envelope with smaller form factors, there's no need to go tearing up a perfectly good pair of jeans with a bulky external hard drive. Enter Seagate, which today announced the availability of its new GoFlex Slim portable drive. This 2.5-inch HDD comes in a shell that's just 9mm thick, which is just barely more than an iPad 2 and skinnier than an iPhone 4.
Seagate this morning announced a slew of new enterprise storage solutions, covering all the bases in the process. These include two new members to Seagate's performance-oriented Pulsar solid state drive (SSD) family, two next generation Savvio 15K and 10K hard drives, and a high capacity Constellation ES.2 3TB HDD.
Hitachi and Western Digital have been shipping 7200 RPM 3TB drives for several months now, but if you’re a Seagate fan, your horse has finally entered the race.
Seagate's pitching its new 3TB Barracuda XT hard drive as an easy-cheesy way to add oodles of storage to your system, even if you're rocking a legacy OS like Windows XP. Same holds true for anyone saddled with a non-UEFI BIOS, which at this stage is pretty much everyone. So how exactly does Seagate slip past the 2.1TB barrier that would normally throw a wrench into such setups? Answer's after the jump.
Western Digital and Seagate have been jockeying for the top spot in the global hard drive market, and the two swapped places in 2010. According to data provided by The Information Network, Seagate's market share dipped from 31.2 percent in 2009 to 29.9 percent in 2010, while Western Digital went from 29.6 percent to 31.4 percent in the same time frame. Hit the jump to find out how WD managed to leapfrog Seagate, and how the rest of the HDD market is shaping up.
Chalk up another milestone for Seagate, which this week announced
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