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Seagate Buying LaCie for $186 Million

I tossed an 1tb lacie external hard disk because it had lot's of bad sectors (hitachi hdd). I don't want to talk about seagate, the body count is too high (between 2010 and now I've tossed about 8~9 seagate hdds).

Still I've seen *every* brand of hdd fail. But lately hard drives are getting crapier (maybe due to the platter density increase). My old 100mb seagate hdd still runs like a champ.

So looks like instead of avoiding 2 brands, I will just avoid one! Nice :D
 
24Frames said:
On what basis do you think that they are worth 300-400 million instead of 186 million? Both players in the transaction are highly sophisticated and have a deep understanding of their businesses, so to me it seems likely that the price is likely to represent a realistic valuation of LaCie.
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The only basis I have is that I see there products all over the place, and I thought that they would just be a bigger and more valuable company thats all.
~ Sk1llz
 
kockgunner said:
I don't know which brands are good anymore. I thought Seagate was well-respected but I keep hearing they aren't too reliable. I also hear Lacies are unreliable, but they've been really reliable for me.
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The basic issue is - there are serious hard drive fanboys, as odd as that might sound. So you get people that will trash-talk anything Seagate makes, others that hate all Western Digital drives, etc. I knew a lot of people who liked Maxtor and hated Seagate, then Seagate bought Maxtor. :D

In my experience, the problems tend to be with particular models of a drive rather than everything a particular vendor makes. So I find it best to just look for well-reviewed products rather than brands.
 
So, quality goes down the drain.

I personally used 10-15 Hitachi drives over the years and none of them have failed in normal use.
On the other side, I connected three of them in an external (cheap) casing and used them in an internet café in Indonesia, they all broke soon there after, probably due to over voltage (USB controller) in those crappy cheap computers they use there.
 
Personally, I've never had any problems with Seagate drives (looks like I'm in the minority!).

I wonder if this will lead to a wider range of Thunderbolt connected storage devices? The LBD is great, but dang it is expensive.
 
Marx55 said:
This is a really sad news. Seagate drives are the best to lose data. Too many horror Seagate drive stories by now. Noisy, heat monsters. I rather want LaCie with Hitachi inside. What a shame!!!
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You know, before Hitachi bought the IBM drive company [which H now sold to WD], they were called "DeathStars" for a reason. [real name was DeskStar for those who don't know] Crappiest drives I ever had, I had 4 out of 7 fail in one year. Never had a Seagate fail in 20 years. And out of many LaCie enclosures, had a few power adapters go out [expected] and one board fail after 8 years of use. Fine by me!
 
hirshnoc said:
Apple-related?
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Very much so. There can't be many Mac based designers who haven't had some kind of contact with LaCie drives over the past couple of decades.

I've had at least half a dozen of them. The portables seem to be able to take a massive amount of abuse.
 
Westside guy said:
...I find it best to just look for well-reviewed products rather than brands.
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I agree. There can be a lot of factors that contribute to HD failure as we all know. For example, back in 2004 I bought a refurbished Digital Audio G4 that came with an IBM DeskStar (ATA). At one point it seriously failed (mechanical failure) and I bought a brand new Hitachi (DeskStar I think, still ATA), and it too failed, but the Hitachi slave drive did not for some reason. Now I could have given up on Hitachi at that point, but instead I decided to get my drives off the motherboard ATA connector and go through PCI instead. So I bought a Sonnet ATA PCI card, disconnected the motherboard ATA cable and never had another problem with hard drive failure after that. I ran a Hitachi and a Maxtor drive off the PCI ATA card, and the only device that remained connected directly to the motherboard so to speak was the CD/DVD drive.

Some time after that I upgraded the ATA card to a Sonnet SATA card and ran a Samsung off it, then another Samsung, then a second Sonnet SATA card with a Seagate drive attached to it (nestled snugly in the previously occupied Zip drive in the carriage tray, because at that point I no longer used the Zip drive at all and because for all the times I had the case open, at that time I hadn't seen the third drive mounting plate at the front of the machine for some reason - it just blended right in I guess :)).

I had no problems whatsoever with Hitachi, Samsung, Maxtor or Seagate drives after switching to a PCI controller card.

Whole point being as originally stated: There are many factors that can contribute to HD failure, and in the example I gave it seemed to be a case of some sort of issue with the ATA connector of the motherboard (or maybe a worn or faulty cable), not the HDs themselves.

All of that being said (and in all fairness) I admit that at one point I wouldn't buy WD drives because when I asked a tech at Microcenter what brand of drive he had seen issues with the most often, he said WD. This was probably 6 years ago or so, and I'm sure WD has worked out whatever that was by now. So I stayed away from WD-branded drives at that time. But, I would buy one now if a particular WD drive fit what I wanted and reviewed well.
 
My LaCie Porsche drive worked fine with my iMac G3 for many years and remains functional. I currently use an Iomega eGo portable drive with my MacBook (running Snow Leopard) but I use LaCie's SilverKeeper backup software, just as I did with the Porsche drive all those years. I like it – I hope they keep offering SilverKeeper as a free download.
 
Mods? May I please have permission to drop a huge f-bomb? Just this once? :mad:

Seagate is garbage. In the last ~20 years I have seen more Seagates fail than any other drive. That might not seem like a very impressive statement coming from most people, but I manage nearly 1000 Macs for work- servers, desktops, laptops. Everything Apple makes, really. I literally have a PILE of dead Seagates sitting in my office. After power supplies in iMac G5s, the only component I replace on a regular basis are Seagate drives. All the dives I replaced with WD discs? Still going strong.

It was bad enough when they bought Maxtor and stole one of the other good manufacturers, now they're going to taint one of the best manufacturers of external drive cases.
 
madrag said:
I hope they keep LaCie's quality, all my external HD are from them and are excelent, the oldest is 9 years and I still use it weekly.

This should be in the frontpage.
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You are lucky. There are a lot of negative experiences with them. Whenever anyone buys one, I tell them not to leave it on all the time. They're not really built for heavy use. Really under relatively constant use they often die just outside the warranty, and the noisy fans don't make for much of a cooling solution. I had an old icy dock firewire enclosure that stayed cooler with just vented cooling (not making this up). Icy dock just uses too much in the way of cheap electronics though. Anyway it seems like the problem with external drives is that they're low margin commodity items, and not very robust. Looking at some of Lacie's other products, they don't make anything in house. They don't do much that is interesting in the way of design. Their monitors were mostly just straight rebadges. They didn't really add anything of their own to them other than slightly tweaked firmware and packaged accessories. If you've ever called them for tech support, they know very little about their own products.

Battlefield Fan said:
Quality? Have you tried their new drives?
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I was just writing on that, and I remembered I've had decent luck with the tough stuff drives or whatever they're called as far as rugged take anywhere hard drives are concerned. Their typical firewire drives really aren't made for heavy use. They put too much into design aesthetics and not enough into efficient cooling.

jjhny said:
I just have to say - 186 million for a company that actually makes a product as opposed to 'Fakebook' which makes absolutely nothing (but is a home for lonely, OCD, narcissists) and was initially valued at 100 billion (remember that 1 billion = 1,000 million).

Seriously - it makes sense that we are in a financial mess when things are this far out of whack!
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Lacie barely makes anything. Most of their stuff consists of rebadged devices. Lacie adds very little aside from marketing and sometimes a nice aesthetic.

blackburn said:
I tossed an 1tb lacie external hard disk because it had lot's of bad sectors (hitachi hdd). I don't want to talk about seagate, the body count is too high (between 2010 and now I've tossed about 8~9 seagate hdds).

Still I've seen *every* brand of hdd fail. But lately hard drives are getting crapier (maybe due to the platter density increase). My old 100mb seagate hdd still runs like a champ.

So looks like instead of avoiding 2 brands, I will just avoid one! Nice :D
Click to expand...

I moved to western digital a long time ago. The caviar black drives are pretty awesome. They don't take long to spin up. They don't have firmware issues. Western Digital support is nicer than Seagate support. They cost a little more, but I've had better results, so I keep buying them. I realize that's anecdotal, but Seagate gets way too many complaints. It's always blamed on a bad batch or bad firmware or whatever. I've just had and seen enough issues with them that I'm no longer buying them. Their enterprise drives might be better.
 
Keep in mind LaCie was once a company owned by Quantum. If you've been around the Mac for a long time, you probably have stored some data on a Quantum-branded drive. Apple used them in most of their computers from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s.

LaCie had some interesting products designed for Mac users in particular at one point. An example is the Baxter drive, which mounted on the rear of a Plus, SE, or Classic.

I'm not sure when they spun off from Quantum, but the Quantum Corporation itself sold its hard drive assets to Maxtor.

I personally think this is a good move for LaCie. Why not develop new external hard drives directly with the maker of the disks themselves?

Say what you want about Seagate's reliability, but every company who makes hard drives has their share of lemons. In the 23 years I've used computers, I've seen models from IBM, Quantum, and other good-reputation companies die rather quickly. On the other hand, I have drives from those companies going strong two decades later. It's a question of design and luck in some cases. The only drive maker I've seen consistently poor quality from is Toshiba.
 
What a Relief!

I was so worried that prices of HD's would come back down to where they were. No worries anymore, we'll never see cheap prices again.
 
Scott Baret said:
Keep in mind LaCie was once a company owned by Quantum. If you've been around the Mac for a long time, you probably have stored some data on a Quantum-branded drive. Apple used them in most of their computers from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s.

LaCie had some interesting products designed for Mac users in particular at one point. An example is the Baxter drive, which mounted on the rear of a Plus, SE, or Classic.

I'm not sure when they spun off from Quantum, but the Quantum Corporation itself sold its hard drive assets to Maxtor.

I personally think this is a good move for LaCie. Why not develop new external hard drives directly with the maker of the disks themselves?

Say what you want about Seagate's reliability, but every company who makes hard drives has their share of lemons. In the 23 years I've used computers, I've seen models from IBM, Quantum, and other good-reputation companies die rather quickly. On the other hand, I have drives from those companies going strong two decades later. It's a question of design and luck in some cases. The only drive maker I've seen consistently poor quality from is Toshiba.
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Quantum made quality products. They mostly do LTO backup devices now.

Maxtor was bought by Seagate.
 
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