Seagate closes its biggest factory for HDD production
We stated it before, HDDs are a dying breed and will become the dinosaurs of the technology age. They have two things going for them, capacity and price. Other then that it is just a matter of time before NAND and other flash storage technologies will catch up here.
In that mindset, Seagate will close one of its biggest production facilities, leaving 2200 people without a job. The factory based in in Suzhou, China is one of their final assembly locations covering an area of over 100,000 square meters and is a big part of the overall production capacity for Seagate. Seagate will be going from 55-60 million per quarter units made towards 35 to 40 million HDDs.
According to media reports the fab already halted making products and the last employees where laid off on January 18, 2017. Below in the screenshots you can see a letter posted to the employees with the announcement.
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Senior Member
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I take issue with the use of the word "Trusty"////
Senior Member
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Joined: 2010-08-27
Mechanical hard drives can be very reliable, as long as you get a good one. SSD's are better for fast speed, mechanical drives still have their place for storage. There will be a time when flash drives are not only cheaper than their mechanical alternatives, but also can cope with large write cycles and have reliable data over time (in terms of the drive not powered), but we're not their yet!
I have a preference for Toshiba drives myself.
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Joined: 2013-03-10
This will inevitably raise prices. Not good.
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Joined: 2015-06-18
As long as WD's drives remain at the same price, I couldn't care less about what these junk peddlers are up to.
Dunno about the shift to SSD's part, most laptops I see on sale and which move the most in units have those awful laptop hdd's and I even saw a Dell XPS 13 with a pathetic 128GB SSD at well over $1000. Why even bother with such a low capacity drive after the whole GB/GiB crap and Windows taking away another 15~GB.
What you say about WD is matter of opinion.
I had every single WD purchased in last 8 years failed because of bad sectors, especially green line is big poo. I had few desktop Seagate fail too, but at least 99.5% of data recoverable compared to less than 85% on WD.
One of reasons I started to use enterprise disks as they tend to last much longer and offer 5years warranty instead of just 2 and as well get much higher read/write performance.
Senior Member
Posts: 11835
Joined: 2011-12-31
As long as WD's drives remain at the same price, I couldn't care less about what these junk peddlers are up to.
Dunno about the shift to SSD's part, most laptops I see on sale and which move the most in units have those awful laptop hdd's and I even saw a Dell XPS 13 with a pathetic 128GB SSD at well over $1000. Why even bother with such a low capacity drive after the whole GB/GiB crap and Windows taking away another 15~GB.