Seagate Laying Off 2,217 Employees

Megalith

Megalith

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Seagate is eliminating a ton of jobs due to declining disk drive sales. The decision is expected to save the company $20 million.

…Seagate is closing its Suzhou disk drive manufacturing plant in China, shedding a whopping 2,217 jobs. The 1.1 million ft2 plant was formerly owned by Maxtor; Seagate having bought Maxtor for $1.9bn in May, 2006. Stifel MD Aaron Rakers puts the closure in the context of Seagate wanting to lower its quarterly cost base, given the overall decline in disk drive sales. He writes: “Seagate exited F1Q17 with 44,455 total employees and we would note that the company’s average annualised operating expense per average employee has stood at ~$35-40k over the past four quarters, which would leave us to conservatively estimate a $20m per quarter savings from the Suzhou-related headcount reduction.”
 
3D X-Point they should of sold their company to Intel wait a second these are Chinese jobs.....
 
I didnt know they had 2,217 people just standing in a shed like the automaker unions had in the 90's when automation was taking over but union contracts said they needed a set amount of employees at each site.

Oh wait if even half of those 2,217 people were doing a half assed job, that drops the savings by 5 mill. And if the employee was just making enough to cover the cost of employment, then the cost savings is zero. Hell i have to make my employer at least 3x-4x base salary when they charge my labor to the customer..
 
Shintai said:
The future is SSD.
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I do think the future is SSD, but it's definitely not right now and probably not even next year. Problem with SSDs is too much demand for the memory. Why the price has remained pretty flat the past like year or two. With tablets, phones, etc now using these chips, the price will probably continue to remain flat or possibly rise as they can't make it fast enough.

DPI said:
Nope.
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I don't think there's a way to deny that the future is SSDs. We'll eventually reach a point where prices start to even out and it'll become harder to increase HDD sizes. When that happens, I don't know, but I definitely see it happening.
 
I've had one single Seagate hard drive fail on me over the decades, just one, so while that's really uncommon (and that's from roughly 220+ drives I've owned myself, been at this computer thing for a long time) I still find Seagate to be very stable storage media. Of course, IBM/Hitachi/HGST still reigns the highest for me with not one single drive ever failing, that includes an actual IBM 60GXP "DeathStar" drive I still own, purchased in 1999 at some point, has like 97,000 hours on it, 2 bad sectors and those only happened in the past 8 months or so.

Sad to see anyone just get tossed out from jobs but this kind of thing is going to continue and it'll get worse as more technology is replaced with better faster more efficient hardware that ends up being manufactured more and more by non-human involved means.
 
Tiberian said:
I've had one single Seagate hard drive fail on me over the decades, just one, so while that's really uncommon (and that's from roughly 220+ drives I've owned myself, been at this computer thing for a long time) I still find Seagate to be very stable storage media. Of course, IBM/Hitachi/HGST still reigns the highest for me with not one single drive ever failing, that includes an actual IBM 60GXP "DeathStar" drive I still own, purchased in 1999 at some point, has like 97,000 hours on it, 2 bad sectors and those only happened in the past 8 months or so.

Sad to see anyone just get tossed out from jobs but this kind of thing is going to continue and it'll get worse as more technology is replaced with better faster more efficient hardware that ends up being manufactured more and more by non-human involved means.
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I've had every single drive in a 3.5" Seagate Enterprise SATA Raid 5 fail on me - usually one at a time. I retired the server when two failed at the same time. Something like 170% failure rate on those drives.

On the other hand, the 2.5" Seagate SAS drives in the Dell R720xd that replaced it have been relatively reliable with only 20% failed in 2 years.
 
Cmdrmonkey said:
Eventually, but hard drives are still needed to for affordable mass storage. Problem is, Seagate makes terrible drives with unacceptable failure rates.
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WD consolidates and got layoffs too. HDDs keep decreasing in volume while SSDs goes up.
 
From the quote, it appears the company will save 20 million every 3 months. That amount will add up quickly!
 
Wow. How times change. I remember when Seagate was the gold standard. I remember Maxtor too and owned drives from each.

I do think SSD is the way to go (I'm 100% SSD now with no issues), but frankly am surprised for as much of a Hard Drive giant Seagate was, that they didn't keep with the times and develop their own SSD to compete.

It's kind of funny to look back at the golden age of enthusiast PCs and see how lucky we were and how good we had it.

I remember when:

  • Newegg was the place to shop because you didn't pay tax, they had a shit ton of stuff, and their Customer Service was top notch, including cross shipping any RMA issues, or even shipping to you first so you could use the box and the label they included to ship back on no charge (oh, how the mighty have greatly fallen there, Icarus style)
  • We had a video game arms race where technology drove game production, and 3dfx, Matrox, ATI, S3, Nvidia, Diamond, and others were all fighting with each other for best price per $ (while licensing out each other's technology, ironically).
  • AMD arrived and for a spell had Intel spinning their wheels (and caused them to massively drop their overinflated prices) for a spell with the Athlon
  • We witnessed the birth of the FPS gaming genre, and saw enthusiast technology advance at an incredible rate, including the birth of water cooling, and custom cases.
What a fantastic time to be alive. When I see stuff like this Seagate announcement, it's almost like another Tombstone to that awesome era.
 
I've had no problem with my Seagate drives. *knock on wood* I'm running 12 of them right now, and while a bit on the noisy side, none have failed.

The funny part is that China is now seeing its jobs outsourced to Cambodia and so forth, new sources of slave labor. So there are a lot of factory closures in China right now, as they pack up and head South for cheaper Asians. And its not like Chinese factory workers are making fortunes, but heaven forbid we pay working people reasonable wages for their labor. *cracks whip*
 
Seagate was pretty good until maybe around the Barracuda 7200.7.
Once they bought Maxtor (crap reliability), started manufacturing in China (I used to only get their made in Singapore drives), everything started going to the shitter.

Also, the Barracudas were never the fastest, coolest or quietest, but never the worst either, sort of middle-of-the-road.

Some of Seagate's drives nowadays are still good, but mainly the enterprise stuff, and anything Samsung-derived and/or non-SMR.
 
Been a while since I've bought HDDs (been using Samsung SSDs). Does anyone still make a reliable HDD these days?
 
Yes HGST or WD black. From reports the black series are having issues also. I went to a local PC hardware store the other day looking for a harddrive. 80 percent were NAS drives. They did have a 5TB for $199. It was a Seagate. I decided I could wait till others were in stock. HDD companies are just shooting themselves in the foot with these high prices.
 
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Who knew they had that many employees? :p

It's amazing that it would take that many people to bring these drives to market.
 
Uvaman2 said:
Its terrible, but their hdd are crap.
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Well, the way I see it is, the consumer space has mostly moved on to SSD's.

Hard drives today are mostly used for either enterprise or home NAS implementations where you have redundancy.

I don't have any Seagate drives, but despite their demonstrated lower reliability, I wouldn't have a problem going with them if I got a good price, because it is so easy to swap out a failed drive and rebuild the array, without risk to my data.

As long as the RMA process is reliable, that is...

Knowing what I know now, I feel like I have wasted lots of money on high quality drives over the years, when I should have just bought the cheaper ones that might fail...
 
grtitan said:
Which undoubtedly, will go into the upper management and share holders pockets...
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Hey, you gotta pay that guy that was told to save money and came up with the idea to lay off a bunch of people that aren't friends with him.
 
grtitan said:
Which undoubtedly, will go into the upper management and share holders pockets...
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Well, I mean, the purpose of a corporation is to make money for its shareholders, so this shouldn't be surprising. That is the very reason they exist.

Who would invest money in a company if they didn't anticipate getting a return?

The officers of a corporation have a legally binding fiduciary responsibility to do what is in the best interest of the shareholders at the expense of everything and everyone else.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
because it is so easy to swap out a failed drive and rebuild the array, without risk to my data.
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I'm not running a data center or anything, so others are certainly more knowledgeable... However, it was my understanding that the following does happen at some frequency - wherein you are rebuilding the raid array, and you experience yet another drive failure during the rebuild. And if that happens during the rebuild you're pretty much fuxxored. I believe physical failures are one source, as well as the second source being that drives have an accepted failure rate on reading or writing any particular bit. This individual failure rate used to never be seen, but in today's gigantic drives - rebuilding 4TB of data means it is probable to happen.

I think my point is that you still want really reliable HDDs in your NAS because there is a higher than you think chance your raid array won't rebuild properly. N+1 redundancy isn't foolproof because of the rebuild process.

Maybe someone can explain it better than I can...
 
wherein you are rebuilding the raid array, and you experience yet another drive failure during the rebuild. And if that happens during the rebuild you're pretty much fuxxored.
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You should not be using raid5. You also should have a backup. RAID is not a backup. Also you should do weekly scrubs.
 
drescherjm said:
You should not be using raid5. You also should have a backup. RAID is not a backup.
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So I know that, and I have a backup, etc. etc. But 1) a lot of people don't and 2) it's still a PITA to put your NAS back together if it blows up during a raid array rebuild. Besides - there's almost always some timespan between now, and the last backup (hopefully acceptable loss - but zero loss is best).

I just see a lot of people acting nonchalant about rebuilding raid arrays, and I think they need to realize it's a bigger deal than they make it out to be.

Just trying to be helpful...
 
DocSavage said:
On the other hand, the 2.5" Seagate SAS drives in the Dell R720xd that replaced it have been relatively reliable with only 20% failed in 2 years.
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You have a low standard for drive reliability. 20% failure in 2 years not good.

I really hate that Dell usually uses Seagate drives that have such a high failure rate. Once the drives are out of warranty I buy 3rd party drives and have much better luck with WD drives.
 
Kongar said:
So I know that, and I have a backup, etc. etc. But 1) a lot of people don't and 2) it's still a PITA to put your NAS back together if it blows up during a raid array rebuild. Besides - there's almost always some timespan between now, and the last backup (hopefully acceptable loss - but zero loss is best).

I just see a lot of people acting nonchalant about rebuilding raid arrays, and I think they need to realize it's a bigger deal than they make it out to be.

Just trying to be helpful...
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Well, it depends.

My 12 disk pool is split up between two RAIDz2 vdevs (ZFS equivalent of Raid6) so I could have a total of 4 drives lost (two from each 6 disk vdev) without data loss.

In other words, out of 12 total disks, I'd need to have 3 fail on the same half of the pool in order for me to experience data loss.

This is certainly possible, but it hasn't come close yet. Biggest risk of this is during initial setup as you have many new drives which may or may not have manufacturing defects. Once you have been up for a while, multiple simultaneous or near simultaneous drive failures are less and less likely.

I also encrypt and send my data to a cloud backup. it is set to sync all my files every 15 minutes (unless the previous sync is incomplete). I can technically restore all my data at 15 minute increments (though I do admit, having to do so would be a royal pain in the ass, and the download time for my currently backed up 12TB would be.... long....)

So, I have enough redundancy that data loss due to disk failure is highly unlikely, and if it does happen, I do have a reliable backup to restore from, even though it would be a major pain in the butt.

The thing is, while Seagate drives have had higher failure rates than WD or HGST, they haven't been significantly enough higher that my data loss risk would be significantly affected. As such I would happily consider them IF I GOT A GOOD DEAL. Price is key here. They would have to be a good bit cheaper than WD drives and A LOT cheaper than HGST drives for me to consider this. Right now, WD's Red and Seagats NAS drives are priced pretty much at parity, which means, I'd go with WD Red without thinking twice.
 
DocSavage said:
On the other hand, the 2.5" Seagate SAS drives in the Dell R720xd that replaced it have been relatively reliable with only 20% failed in 2 years.
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Yeah, 20% failure in 2 years seems abysmal.

Even the Seagate drives that people complained about, I believe were only running 5-6% per two years.

In order to call something good, I'd be hoping to see about a 1% failure rate over 2 years.
 
drescherjm said:
You should not be using raid5. You also should have a backup. RAID is not a backup. Also you should do weekly scrubs.
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LOL time for some warm fuzzies.

Ok so raid 5 has a an unrecoverable read error (URE) rate of about 1 every 12tb read. So if you have 3 3tb drives(aka 1 parity), you have a 50% chance in hell of not losing ALL of your data. If you have 3 6tb drives, you have an almost 100% chance of losing all your data. Hell move to raid 6, then you will at least have a 50% chance.

Raid for protection died a long time ago. You raid for speed now :)
 
DPI said:
Nope.
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It is, but not anytime soon at the current prices. Not for your average consumer at least. Although when prices hit ~$60-80 for 500GB, I think most consumer PCs will transfer over. I don't think the average PC user uses more than 200-300GB these days, especially with streaming and most things moving to the cloud.
 
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