Posted on 01/19/2006 9:27:46 PM PST by CAWats
Bill Watkins says his main competitor is the company he runs, Seagate Technology.
"I worry less about our competitors than I do about us executing our strategy," said Watkins, chief executive of the disk-drive maker, in an interview. "If we execute, it will be hard for others to keep up."
Seagate's rivals aren't keeping up. In the $30 billion industry for hard-disk drives, Seagate is king and getting stronger.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
What rivals? WDC isn't anyone's rival. The only rival was Maxtor and they just bought Maxtor.
I've done a lot of design work for Seagate. It's one of the best companies on earth; their only standard is quality.
Winchester is long dead.
I've stopped buying Maxtor drives. Their big drives (>160 GB) seem to die after a couple of years. They use to have a 5 year warranty. Now its only a year. Seagate is one of the few that still offers a 5 year warranty.
Iused to buy Western Digital hard drives. Then I discovered Seagate's 5 year warranty, and High customer rating at Newegg. Thats all I buy now.
I've got a bunch of Maxtor 200gigers that are doing okay for more than a year now.
I've had bad luck with their Quantum brand though. Their SCSI drives fail like crazy. Still, that's after 2+ years of constant enterprise use. What drive is going to last forever?
What I liked about Maxtor was that they were constantly pushing the edge and keeping the industry on its toes.
It was a crap stock to own, but I made a good bit when Seagate took the plunge. My father was a huge Maxtor fan. He fell in love with the stock. (big mistake for any stock) He talked me into buying some and both my mom and I kept the stock after he died for sentimental reasons. I was pleasantly surprised when the sale went through. :D
Funny thing is, in the last 20 years the only drive I had that crapped out was a Seagate. All I buy are WD.
Great little drive. I loaded it up with email, browser, etc from Portable Applications.
Now any computer with a USB port and Internet connection is my computer. Beats carrying around a Notebook computer :)
I saw a presentation today where the speaker took the improvements in processor speed, network bandwidth, and storage and multiplied them together to give the synergistic improvement in our ability to handle information over the last 40 years.
The total: 1038, truly an astronomical number.
Even without Maxtor, Seagate, based in the Cayman Islands but with operational headquarters in Scotts Valley, Calif., is No. 1. It's followed by Japan's Hitachi, (HIT) which bought IBM's (IBM) disk drive business two years ago, and Lake Forest, Calif.-based Western Digital, (WDC) which Thursday traded at its highest stock price since 1997.
I had a 40 pound drive, I took it apart with my Boy Scout troop. They got to scavenge the platters and such.
Marvelous engineering work back then. Mine came from a Sun workstation.
Let me guess. The hdd sector is benefitting from the need for video and music storage.
I bought to SG 160 external for my music. It's been going for 3 months now and not a problem.
WD Caviar...nothing else comes close.
Ditto. Maxtor is crap.
Big time.
Mine was from a TI Explorer Lisp Machine.
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