Seagate kisses Maxtor goodwill goodbye
In a telling move, Seagate is writing off $2.3bn goodwill from its Maxtor acquisition and other intangible items. Maxtor was purchased for $1.9bn in May, 2006, so Seagate is writing the entire acquisition value off and a bit more besides. There will be a $2.3bn non-cash charge for the second quarter results this financial year …
You mean someone somewhere once thought something good about Maxtor?
I hope this means no more crap Maxtor drives.
In my last job I replaced more cheep crap Maxtor drives than every other brand combined. To this day I will not buy their crap.
I keep reading so many 'in my last job I replaced so many <insert drive mfg> comments, plus, after reading Google's report on drive failures (related to 10,000+ units), that I'm really getting annoyed. Surely someone somewhere can put all this together and come up with the definitive 'most reliable drive' manufacturer?
Drive manufacturers all have their ups and downs (currently it seems to be Seagate's turn for flagellation), but it must be possible chart these. All you guys who are fitting hundreds of drives must have some data...
It's also possible that Seagate is writing this off now because just about all companies are taking a bath. Bad results everywhere.
They have to write it down eventually but doing it now means their future results won't take that hit.
Just maybe.
Wow - I didn't know Maxtor had any goodwill to sell.
wb
They will claim next quarter that they are profitable, and assume everyone forgot about the multi-billion losses.
Well from my point of view working in repairs I can confirm the first comment that maxtor drives definetely have a higher failure rate...
sure sometiems they are fine.. but weve been bitten in the ass so many times now using them its now company policy never under any circumstances to use a maxtor hard disk
Carrying large amounts of goodwill on the books has always seemed rather suspect, so I applaud all goodwill writeoffs. Beancounter logic says when you've wasted a few billion, you should hide it by recording a goodwill asset for as long as you dare. eg Microsoft - $12.5B of goodwill - 30% of net assets; Dell 40% of net assets; Dixons Stores Group - 130% of net assets; Apple - 1% of net assets.
"Surely someone somewhere can put all this together and come up with the definitive 'most reliable drive' manufacturer?"
I don't think so. I work at a computer surplus, and (other than the 40GB+ Deskstars which really did fail way to often) I haven't noticed a large trend. Some particular MODEL will be junk, I think either due to manufacturing problems or perhaps even firmware or design problems.. I don't know. But not the entire brand. Made the same time, some DriveCo model X will be utter crap, DriveCo model Y will be fantastically reliable. I haven't kept hard numbers, but it seems for some particular age drive brand X will be maybe 5-10% better than brand Y.... 6 months newer (or even 3 months) and they've swapped places. Basically one vendor might have a bad batch and that's enough to skew it.
"blah blah blah blah crap blah blah blah Maxtor"
Every time a storage manufacturer is mentioned in a Reg article it gets tons of comments about how crap their drives are. So far I've seen every major manufacturer of drives, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, etc... slammed to hell and back. It's always the same story, too: "When I worked "x" we replaced hundreds/thousands/millions of "x" drives". Either this means all hard discs from every manufacturer suck or IT professionals are a cold and bitter lot who are really mean to their equipment.
Maxtor drives* disappeared when Seagate bought them anyway... I always thought they'd bought them BECAUSE they were so crappy just so people would stop being sucked in by them.
* Only talking about the drives. Seagate continued selling external Maxtor cases with Seagate drives in them.
You'd think you'd find the most vehement arguments in IT in the classical areas:
Windows vs. Linux
AMD vs. Intel (vs. Cyrix vs. IDT/Centaur vs. Transmeta)
Apple vs. not-Apple
emacs vs. vi
big-endian vs. little-endian
coke vs. pepsi
But no. Some of the most vitriolic comments show up in the hard drive brand stories.
Guess it makes sense: HDD failure can *REALLY* hurt, whereas all the others just keep us employed...
Wonderful aren't they? Had the pleasure of sending back four 200GB drives in the space of 2 months. Always got the feeling that Maxtor techs must hang about round back of WD and Seagate factory, near the skips, waiting for the rejects to be thrown out and rebadging them.
Any goodwill Maxtor had, vanished pre-2000 I'm afraid, as a very quick straw poll around most IT departments will verify. Seagate, do yourself a big favour, strip the assets and sell what's left to come schmuck, for a dollar!
