Thread regarding Seagate Technology Inc. layoffs

MAMR is b.s.

Anyone who knows HDD can easily show the window for it to work is small and the AD gains are even smaller.

lol@3ypa. Did you see STX financials for Q1? "During the quarter, Seagate shipped a record 70.3 exabytes of HDD storage."

You say "WD market cap is almost 3x STX...They are the largest HDD manufacturer... the leader in enterprise HDD. blaa blaaa blaaa."

Yet what Seagate achieved with 70.3 exabytes is twice what WD achieved last quarter.

Gee, little Seagate is beating the fat Wanker Duffus Corp.

I guess we will see what story WD fabricates when they report on Oct 26. I'm sure you will be right here to make excuses for the flatulence coming from your hero's arseholes.

Funny how the WD guys can't seem to go play on their board.

Good job Seagators.

4opz ... apparently downloading fisting dwarf Russian porn comes with some risk of computer infection and major drive issues. Who'd guess that would be a problem, with Watkins advocating the practice and all.

I'm starting a go-fund me drive if anyone wants to help with my latest run-in with an interesting organization from the dark internet located somewhere in the Volga District indicating that I need to come up with $300 in byte coin if I want my life back. :/

What the hell is a "byte coin"?

@PK4yfDs-4opz ...eight computers in fifteen years?? Wtf are you doing with them that you had to get a new one every two years?

3bk3, you need to do a little research. Per a recent Blackblaze article:

"Seagate’s drives are improving, Western Digital’s are getting worse......That’s according to service records compiled by Blackblaze, a cloud backup provider, Ars Technica is reporting. Blackblaze makes a habit of regularly sharing their experience with various models of hard drives, a potentially valuable resource for anyone shopping for a drive. If you wanted to run a scientific experiment on hard-drive lifespans, a data center with 56,224 drives would be a great place to start. This is what makes Blackblaze’s report such interesting reading: they have a lot of hard drives running constantly, and offer a lot of details about the 18 different models of hard drives in their center...."

I have no problem criticizing crappy products. But out of the 8 computers I've owned over the last 15 years with Seagate, WD and Maxtor hard drives, the only ones that crashed and burned was one of two Maxtor drives (before Seagate bought them out in 2006), and two of 3 WD drives. None of the 3 Seagate drives had any issues.

I'm sure other folks will have other view points. I'm willing to give each company a little credit. Both are creating phenomenal products at ridiculously low prices, selling millions of drives, staying in business, paying dividends, employing good people, doing intelligent research, etc. I suspect both HAMR and MAMR will experience hiccups and endup working just fine.

We are trying are engineering best to execute on HAMR even while working in a volatile demoralized work environment. If ponytail pushes MAMR you can best believe we will take on that engineering challenge, as well.

Yeah but now they are peddling all this 'reliability' and 'cost' baloney. As if any of that matters. All that matters is shipping HAMR first, which Seagate will do. Not at all important if drives burn up. We will just make more.

It feels weird that STX people still hold the view that WD is just a copy cat. WD market cap is almost 3x STX. They are the largest HDD manufacturer, the leader in enterprise HDD and they have meaningful footprint in the SSD business. They have far more cards to play.

@2nrk.

You are correct. Helium was a drive improvement that helped to advance the industry. At the time I was little surprised WD took the technology-forward initative with helium, after so many technology-following design decisions. Seagate was quick to see the advantages with helium and was able to bring their own helium models to the market in very short order. LOL. That is simple free enterprise my good chap.

HAMR on the other hand has taken years to develop. WD admits the effort was to much for them. (Probably because they haven't acquired one yet to reverse engineer.) So they come out with a big 'announcement' showing a drive that supposedly uses MAMR. No indication of the drive capacity. Just a wink and a "trust us, it works". LOL. In the meantime Seagate has been demonstrating the HAMR technology in real drives for some time, and if Mark's timetable goes as planned, OEM customers will have evaluation models shortly, with 16T drives planned for sale in 2018/19.

Cool, eh? :)

https://siliconangle.com/blog/2017/10/16/hot-storage-technology-gets-a-cool-down-from-western-digital-letdatathrive/

Well said. In the WD announcement, they said:

"All (WD's) future data center drives will come with MAMR"

This is a big statement IMO. We all know that capacity enterprise will be the only market for HDDs (all other battles vs. SSD, such as client or performance enterprise, are lost or will be lost soon). If WD is gonna deploy MAMR to capacity enterprise, it certainly means very very very serious business.

@21ax A few years ago, WD announced Helium as the breakthrough. And STX laughed at it, saying HAMR would win it all. And we all see what really happened, right?

I look forward to you being enlightened as well. Until then, shut-up. HAMR or MAMR, it doesn't matter. What matters is first to market with ever-larger capacity drives. By WD's own admission, it seems they are admitting they are perfectly happy coming in second behind Seagate.

By now, I don’t think anybody believes the recurrent stale joke about the “imminent” deployment of HAMR HDDs into the marketplace that STX’s myopic execs (“Mr. Ponytail,” et al.) have been pushing for the past many years. Even if STX delivers on the last iteration of the joke in question (“16 GB HAMR HDDs by 2018-19,” if not mistaken), which in all likelihood is just BS, who is going to adopt a technology that, relative to MAMR, has so many drawbacks: cost ineffectiveness; low yield (high complexity/process content); inherently poor reliability (laser-induced heating of magnetic medium); need for host optimization (to manage wear leveling of magnetic medium due to laser heating).….Perhaps STX should try to market HAMR as a cyberweapon (think laser-induced sublimation/obliteration of critical data of unfriendly nations) and get a government contract…who knows, our “extremely high IQ” POTUS might go for it (LOL!)...Sadly, STX’s future does not look promising

In Western Digital's announcement, they have one slide showing that (based on their actual drive measurements) MAMR has 100x lifetime compared to HAMR. That is 100x difference, baby! Anyone working on drive integration would tell you how f***ing hard it is to get 100x boost in drive life time. Can't wait to see our management's reaction to this!

Another point is that WD claims they've got three key PMR tech component ready to launch the MAMR product: Helium, micro actuator and Damascene process. Not an expert on micro-actuator, but I know STX is certainly behind in Helium technology. And STX is still using Dry Pole (not WD's Damascene) process. Even if STX wants to play the catch-up game in MAMR, WD will be "multi-years ahead" (per WD's Mike Cordano) in MAMR. This is very scary.

Surely, STX's management team would play down MAMR and stress that it is going to launch HAMR first in 2018. But I don't know if the Wall Street believes that.

STOP THE HAMRING!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VB-TZQdld80

Enjoy the silence.

The next earnings call (10/23) will be very interesting. I bet Wall Street analysts will ask the STX management team about their comments on the Western Digital MAMR announcement. Let's see.

Comments are spot on. Love the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otCpCn0l4Wo

I go back far enough to when WD was bankrupt and the execs put out a presentation about how WD was clinging by "selling stale bread." Guess karma has a way of coming back around.

I love how they piss on our backs and tell us it's raining. Cant wait to see how they spin this.

Correctly said. When He drives came from WD I still remember how the mgmt commented that WD is wrong and lost the whole market. When WD bought Sandisk, again WD was wrong and lost the SSD market. Now it’s HAMR’s turn. Good going.