this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Seagate posts 30% growth as HAMR drives lift it from slump – Blocks and Files (blocksandfiles.com)
submitted 2 days ago by Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world to c/hardware@lemmy.world
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[–] Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Although Seagate is currently doing well, its annual revenues are still well below its 2012 peak of $14.9 billion. The company has consistently failed to match that revenue level in the intervening years as SSDs have killed its enterprise high-performance disk, laptop, PC, and workstation disk drive sales.

It found a consistently growing market in enterprise and hyperscale mass-capacity, nearline drives, where its HAMR tech has given it a capacity advantage over main rival Western Digital. Seagate is now sampling its fourth generation HAMR tech drives, with 44 TB capacities in prospect.

Not a great position to be in. I do wonder if they will ever be able to beat their $14.9 B annual record.

[–] PleaseLetMeOut@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I do wonder if they will ever be able to beat their $14.9 B annual record.

I doubt it. Everybody knows their drives are less reliable, even compared to Toshiba sometimes. So anyone with any sense is buying WD ~~or HGST (they're the same company now, I know).~~

They've let themselves become known as the Wish.com of storage. Should have stopped skimping on quality 15-20 years ago... then maybe...

Edit: HGST is apparently trash now and Toshiba is really good.

[–] Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Is Seagate really that bad though?

I just go with WD Gold as I tend to use HDDs for 10+ years and I would rather pay a bit more to have the peace of mind.

[–] remon@ani.social 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I switched my entire server to seagate (exos) 3 years ago after I had 3 WD red drives (non of which was older then 4 years) fail within a year. Haven't had any issues since ... I'm not buying WD anymore for the foreseeable future.

[–] PleaseLetMeOut@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 days ago

Sounds like you got very-unlucky with WD then just regular-lucky with Seagate :P

A good way to think of "quality" in terms of how the manufacturing industry uses the term: Even if Seagate has a 2-4% failure rate (which they do, see my other comment) that still means 96-98% of their drives are just fine (and you probably fall in this group, which is great). But in terms of modern manufacturing, your failure/return rate should be ~1% or less. Otherwise you're just throwing money away, not only on the RMAs, but also all the wasted time/money on manufacturing/disposing of all of those failed drives. So it's a potential 2-3 fold loss (so 4-12% in their case) in revenue. That's not a very good business strategy.

Not to mention you're dealing with millions of drives and customers. Which leads to hundreds/thousands of people voicing their frustrations publicly and you developing a bad reputation. Again, they've done it to themselves.

[–] PleaseLetMeOut@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2024/ (they also do quarterly reports, but I prefer annual reports for the larger sample sizes)

Scroll down to the chart for failure rates by manufacture. Seagate literally has 2-3 times the failure rate of all other manufactures. Maybe 1-2 quarters aren't, but even then they're still noticeably higher.

Edit: Just noticed HGST did horribly last year and Toshiba is actually looking pretty damn good now. Might have to give them a try sometime.

[–] BurgerBaron@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

https://platinumdatarecovery.com/blog/most-reliable-brand

https://smallusefultips.com/which-brand-of-hard-drive-is-most-reliable/#Backblazes_Hard_Drive_Reliability_Study

Take with a grain of salt.

"We can conclude that reliability and failure disk rates depend on the disk models and their running environment."

WD still on top, but Seagate was in second place here.

I'm just a home hobbyist archiver, but while I'm aware of Seagate's past reputation I think they're better now. I had 8x8TB IronWolf drives in one NAS before my 2025 upgrade back to Western Digital Red that were exceeding avg lifespan without any prematures. Idk I was pretty impressed since they weren't operating in ideal circumstances with the DS1819+ OOB. I've since fixed the cooling and vibration issues. The IronWolf drives exceeded expected average lifespan and were still working, just houred out.

[–] Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Thanks! Will check it out when I am at my PC.

I was also under the impression that these days Seagate was doing better and was only moderately behind WD.