Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too

Re:Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without discl... by aasasd on Saturday April 18, 2020 @09:30AM (#22907565)

Is there a trusted hdd manufacturer left? I'd like to not spend several weeks on research when I again get the urge to rebuild the NAS.

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Re:Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without discl... by segfaultbuserr on Saturday April 18, 2020 @09:42AM (#22907654)

Wikipedia has a great diagram showing the process of hard disk drive manufacturer consolidation that tells a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Driv...

Now it's a perfect oligopoly: Seagate, WD, and Toshiba, just like the stories from many other industries.

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Re:Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without discl... by rasz on Saturday April 18, 2020 @11:23AM (#22908346)

Its a guaranteed 30% profit margin industry with very high patent moat. No incentives to change anything.

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Re:Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without discl... by chx on Saturday April 18, 2020 @12:53PM (#22909013)

> Its a guaranteed 30% profit margin industry

While I was surprised by that figure https://www.seagate.com/ca/en/news/news-archive/seagate-tech... this corroborates, with margin figures indeed roughly 30%-ish.

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Re:Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without discl... by noisem4ker on Saturday April 18, 2020 @12:30PM (#22908793)

The article mentions thin margins and declining volume due to SSDs. I wonder where the truth lies.

Anyway, I'd rather data-starve for a couple years and save up for a big SSD rather than feed those responsible for such consumer-hostile practices.

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Re:Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without discl... by folmar on Saturday April 18, 2020 @04:23PM (#22910789)

Not that SSD vendors are much better... see other comments in this post.

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Re:Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without discl... by Filligree on Saturday April 18, 2020 @09:37AM (#22907607)

No, this names all three.

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Re:Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without discl... by MrBuddyCasino on Saturday April 18, 2020 @12:57PM (#22909044)

HGST still has a good reputation, due to top backblaze stats.

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Re:Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without discl... by dragontamer on Saturday April 18, 2020 @01:28PM (#22909316)

HGST was bought by WD, and then parts of it were forcibly sold off to Toshiba for anti-trust reasons.

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Re:Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without discl... by Wowfunhappy on Saturday April 18, 2020 @01:00PM (#22909070)

They were bought by WD a few years back.

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Re:Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without discl... by loeg on Saturday April 18, 2020 @01:19PM (#22909243)

2012 in fact. I thought it was much more recent, myself.

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Re:Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without discl... by MrBuddyCasino on Saturday April 18, 2020 @05:15PM (#22911148)

They lead the Backblaze charts since years, so having been bought doesn't seem to matter much?

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Re:Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without discl... by loeg on Saturday April 18, 2020 @06:21PM (#22911605)

They were osntensibly a fully independent subsidiary (for antitrust reasons) through 2015.

For the years after that: yes, it seems WD did not want to destroy the high-quality reputation and engineering excellence they paid $4B for.

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Re:Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without discl... by lpah4all on Saturday April 18, 2020 @11:28AM (#22908386)

Shouldn't their 5-year warranty drives still be good?

My favorite idiom comes from China: Pay a lot, cry once.

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