Seagate is too reliant on other companies to provide it with the hardware it needs to manufacture SSD. It has no SSD capabilities itself. HDD will be around for some years to come but will only serve a smaller niche market for cheap surveylance and archive storage. Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) is their last throw of the dice as far as large capacity HDD storage is concerned and if they fail to get it to work or if it's reliability comes into question there wiil be a lot more Seagate employee's looking for another job.
14 replies (most recent on top)
Seagate was working on HAMR when I was with them. Layed off in 2009 and HAMR people lost their jobs too. Management, Montemorrra said get rid of it and Seagate did. Year into it, they brought it back. Montemorrra still on the team again. Ridiculous! Been working on HAMR for more than 12 years. Wrong players.
Hynix is simply HYJINKS, the kind of kooky hi-jinks that marketing uses to convince investors of viability. Gullible, McFly.
No wayu Seagate gonna come back. Jus no wayu.
"A h--ker's chance in hell of surviving in a supermax man prison"... fascinating comparison, as Spock would say.
Seagate is circling the drain. When you lay off the expensive, experienced engineering brains, there's no way pimply faced kids can pick all that shiit up.
It was fun, but Seagate is dun.
Too hard to read that without proper punctuation. Where did you get your degree buddy?
If "Mr Ponytail," the "high level guy" leading HAMR development and productization efforts at Seagate happens to be the former SVP of R&D of Read-Rite, which went bankrupt (bought by WD subsequently) for supplying poor quality R/W heads to HDD makers, and the former VP of Advanced Recording Research of Seagate’s failed short-lived Pittsburgh Research Center (where HAMR development was initiated) and, moreover, considering that Seagate has been “at the verge of” deploying HAMR-based HDD products in multiple occasions (lost count) over the past 4-5 years but failed to do so, then the notion that the Seagate will successfully commercialize HAMR technology in the near future is not a particularly credible one. As stated by others, Seagate’s HAMR talk is just empty talk to create the illusion, in the mind of shareholders/investors in particular, that the company’s potential for technological and financial success going forward is “great.”
I knew bunch of people from HAMR.
HAMR reliability s---s. How would focusing energy to heat up a nanometer-sized area help reliability in any way? All reliability measures in electronics known to human being is to cool down (CPU fan, water cooling, etc.), not the other way around! The only hope of HAMR is the discovery of a miracle material. Otherwise, I don't see a solution to the reliability problem.
WD market cap now double Seagate
I've sold all my Seagate stock past few weeks and bought WD stock instead. WD will do well in the future with Sandisk.
Seagate will never be a serious player in SSD as long as they have such a high margin requirement.
Mr. Ponytail knows HAMR is never going to be ready for production, but is paid to pretend it will, so management can continue to sell Seagate as a company with a future to investors. They'll keep the pretense going until 1) they can't afford the costs, or 2) the systems storage business starts to grow.
There's a high level guy with a ponytail that keeps selling HAMR up. Once it's "de-prioritized", there's a lot of extremely high paid people supporting it that would be subjected to being let go to continue the cost-cutting strategy to counter cliff diving revenue. Seagate keeps talking up it's SSD line, but has a 0.1% market share. Can Hynix rescue it? Perhaps. The Seagate systems entry and Clusterstor platform is one area of hope to branch out a new revenue stream?
I was recently laid off from the seagate conglomo... I was "part" of that HAMR project, and I CAN TELL YOU, "they" have SO many obstacles yet to overcome on that science project yet, and that there is NO WAY of a prostitute surviving in an all male prison facilities chance of that making it to market in a timely manner to save ANY jobs at seagate - period. Any chance it HAD, was shot by seagate laying off the people that knew how to make it work. Their only hope is to train a bunch of "kids" fresh out of school that 'barely' know how a hard drive works, much less what a little thing called "margin" works, HDD as we know it and reliability is likely to be a by-gone era. Back up your data frequently and redundantly!
Well, they are announcing the hynix JV in the next couple of weeks.
Hynix looks to be giving a fairly large stake for what Seagate brings to the table, which will be the SAS and NVMe product lines. Seagate will abandon the SATA SSD shortly thereafter, there's no money to be made in it.
If the JV goes very well, look for Hynix to take full control a few years down the road. This will be a boon to STX stock holders but signal the end of any kind of revenue growth.