[BBLISA] Whatever happened to Seagate?

[Rich Braun]

Carl Alexander observed:
> Since roughly when the first bubble burst, the hard-drive
> market has been too competitive and fluid ... [if one has]
> seen enough recent drives to discern a pattern among any one
> manufacturer's products, that pattern will have played itself out.

No more, IMHO. The manufacturers that still exist now are basically the ones
that existed at the time I exited years of data-center management (now that
everything at work is AWS all day.)

Ever since about 2010, the choices have narrowed to WD/HGST, Seagate and
Toshiba. HGST merged into WD in March 2012, but remains quasi-independent
(perhaps thanks to China's ministry of commerce?)

Who am I leaving out?  I miss the days when there was a "competitive and
fluid" marketplace with 8-10 leading rivals plus another couple dozen niche
competitors, but consolidation into precisely 3 companies has led us down the
path of the 365-day warranty. Toshiba's in a niche of its own, so we have
precisely two HDD choices, the same ones I used in 2007-2010 at work.

The SSD market is separate and still semi-competitive but even there, we don't
have a lot of choices.  For the most part, the options boil down to Samsung,
SanDisk, Crucial, or...who? OCZ, IBM? But yeah, there's a list of 20 of them
here: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-top10-31.html

-rich