News Samsung looking to sell hard drive business?

Love the statistical analysis bods coming out - don't think you guys are a representative sample!!

Only comment I can make is I've bought 5 Samsung 1Tb F1 drives and they are all still running fine and performing well. Means nothing of course...

 

I'm with the anti-Seagate crowd. My dad had a Packard Hell (and it was hell, a 1.6 Semphron in 06 :/ ) which went through 5 Seagate HDD's in 4 years!

 

I wouldn't mind them raising their prices a bit to stay in business. I love Sammy drives. If they do close/sell out then it's back to WD drives. Not my favorite since I don't trust there greem line of drives and all I need ATM is high capacity drives

 

Noooo!
I was just gonna get an F3 (which comes well recommended), but now if it breaks who knows where i'd go for support?

So it's between Seagate and Western Digital now. A light Russian Roulette, as I can't remember which manufacturer's drives always let me down... I think it was the latter.

 

To be fair the new WD Green terabyte stays up at 7200RPM and at 64Mb, has 4 times the cache of my Blue half-terabyte so "Green" seems more like a buzzword or a badge now.

In general Samsung have a rep for good value and I'm talking all the way back to their VCRs not just PC stuff, I'm really hoping they do a 3M and just spin it off independently. It's crazy if a billion bucks (if that's what they get for the HDD division) isn't enough to stay in the business.

 

Sad news, the very first computer I put together had a spinpoint 250gb hard drive on a socket 939 build. It's still going strong to this day in that very same computer. I'm probably going to stick with WD since that's the other company I've used since then for a few computers at my office and for my father's computer and their drives don't give me issues either. I've only used two Hitachi drives, not sure if they were made before or after WD bought them but they work well too, although they are louder than my other drives.

As for the comment above about the WD Green Terabytes, I've had one as my primary drive in my current gaming PC for a year now and it too has worked as intended and never given me any issues. I don't feel like there's been any performance lose between the Green line and the Black line from what I've used them for. Gaming and Media Storage. I don't use a RAID setup though or any sort of backup software so I can't say if that drive would work properly with that sorta setup.

 

I couldn't care less about cache or RPM, I just want a reliable storage drive and from the reviews I've read the greens just don't meet that. I've read many failures on the green line of drives and not nearly as many as a comparable Samsung drive

 

I have two hard disks in this machine, Samsung and Seagate. The Seagate comes from my old computer, and Samsung was in when I bought this computer used. A lot of use for both and they run solid. SMART tables are also good.
Now if the Seagate makes the worst hard drives, that must be because they bought Maxtor a while back and they're still in business

 

Noo... Need to pick up an f4 pretty quickl then =/

 

I too only use Samsung Hdd's. Had a seagate hdd a few years ago and it run hot and very loud. WD hdd's are overpriced and seagate hdd's have reliability issues.....please Samsung, don't sell!!!

 

WD's blow. Especially their external drives

 

Maybe you should get one, there's more to them than just boot speeds. It's saved me tearing my hair out waiting for games to load up or for levels to load. I'm impatient.

On top of that they're silent with no moving parts. I'd say more practical than geeky TBH. An OS and a few games is all I need on my main drive, HDDs are just for storage.

And, aside from on here, I'm not sure anybody else knows I have an SSD.

I'd be sad to see Samsung leave the HDD market though. Been thinking about picking up an F3 1T for storage, may do anyway seeing as they're sub £40.

 

Ironically, a month ago I was speaking to a "Business Continuity Analyst" (DR engineer in old language) who swears by the WD EARS drives. He reckoned the Samsungs use cheaper components and doesn't trust them.

Horses for courses I guess.

 

I have a Samsung AND a load of WDs, but stuck with Blue when they went colour coded because of dragging spindle speeds down. The colour coding system was a dumb idea and looks like it's contributed to a marketing as well as a technical failure.

Slag off WD all you like, they're not the ones looking to swan off out of the market.

 

A bit OT, but I don't really know why people fawn so much over SSDs. There're too many inherent problems with them. Yes, they're fast *readers*, but at what cost? And I'm not only talking about the general price of an SSD (it's slowly coming down). You also need to keep a fair share if the drive free so as not to jeopardize the write speed (read/erase/write).

Write cycles go down with every die shrink; used to be 10000 write cycles and now it's down to 3-5000. There's only so much that wear leveling algorithms can do.

Oh and then there're the firmware updates. Bad luck if the update takes your data with it (Intel says hi).

I'm pretty sure SSDs will be amazing once they've ironed out those little "quirks".

 

I've used Samsung's exclusively since the nineties - never had a single one go yet (touch wood). Only ever change them to increase capacity when it becomes inefficient to keep the old ones in...

Glad to see the Seagate Momentus XT get a thumbs up though - I'm still mulling over getting one of those. They don't need TRIM, right?

 

My SSD reads and writes at twice the rate of my F1 drives (I haven't measured my F3 speeds yet)

Until a recent major upgrade and reinstall, I had well over 100gigs on my 120GB drive and it showed no evidence of slowing down - unlike mech drives, when they get near to their max capacity.

Five year warranty on my drive, some have ten.

Nope, I have updated the firmware without losing anything.

Looks to me like they have most of them covered.

Yes, they are expensive. However, once you experience just how responsive your PC becomes, you can easily accept the premium.

 

Well I have had wd and samsung hdds. Did purchase 2x2TB new (different batches) Seagate drives and both died with two days.

 

Me, too, Nooooooooo

I've got a 1TB WD Green Drive, and it's awful. It's my media drive, and whenever I access it for the first time after boot, the lag is atrocious, to the point that it makes me nervous that it's failing. It hasn't yet, but the plan as of now is to replace it with Samsung 1-2TB drives. I don't believe I've had any unexpected failures from Seagate, but after the firmware debacle on the 1.5TB drives a few months back, I'm not entirely comfortable trusting them.

As I recall, there have been studies done, and it works out that all the manufacturers are roughly equal in failure rates. At least close enough that differences were within the margin of error. But it seems like some people are just not meant to own certain brands of drives, and hence you get the zealots that insist WD/Seagate/Hitachi/whatever are trash and WD/Seagate/Hitachi/whatever are the best. For me, when it gets right down to it, the only brand I will avoid forever is Hitachi. Even though it was IBM at the time, the 'Deathstar' drives have burned too deeply in my consciousness for me to trust them again.

 

I've had HD's from every brand fail, but given the amount I've had over 20 or so years, it's not surprising. All this will do is reduce competition further, potentially raising prices.

I can't see mechanical drives going anywhere for quite a few years... until SSD's have price parity with them, they will have a place in the market.