Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

My day job is working as an HPC Sysadmin on a decent sized supercomputer with petabyte scale storage for a private consulting company. I spend a lot of time dealing with and thinking about storage and honestly I don&#x27;t think mechanical disks are long for this world.<p>For our next storage expansion it&#x27;s ALMOST worth ditching storage tiering and going to an all flash&#x2F;SSD configuration. There is so much hassle involved with mechanical disks relative to SSD. SSDs are by no means perfect but I don&#x27;t have a steady stream of SSDs being pulled out of production due to mechanical failures.

Couldn&#x27;t shake that Maxtor curse. Good riddance, I say. I&#x27;m involved in the Seagate class action over bad drives, but like many other class actions I&#x27;ve been involved in, I seriously doubt I&#x27;ll see much of the thousands of dollars I&#x27;ve sunk into drives Seagate sold me knowing they had atrocious failure rates. Perhaps a five or ten dollar consolation check like usual.

Still using a HDD here. Would like to transition, but holding out for better price&#x2F;capacity ratios. It&#x27;s really clear that it&#x27;s the bottleneck for everyday use at this point; I recently went to 16GB RAM which stopped a lot of Windows swapping behavior, and now the major pain points are bootup, storage-intensive tasks, and bloated web sites.

Not a surprise to me, their HDDs are junk. I&#x27;ve had two burn out in work machines and one personal external burn out. I never buy their gear anymore

This plant should&#x27;ve been closed down when they bought Maxtor - it was a huge part of Seagate&#x27;s quality drop in the late 0&#x27;s.

I liked the exploded diagram, I wouldn&#x27;t have guessed a single HDD was the product of 6 different countries.

While slightly costly, you can buy a 4TB 2.5&quot; SSD in a normal thickness drive. You can not do that with a HDD, the only 4TB 2.5&quot; HDD I am aware of is a 15mm thick one which does not fit in, well, pretty much anything, not laptops, not most bays, nothing, they are only usable as an external drive (but it&#x27;s useful that way, I have one). I believe this is the first time the capacity crown goes to an SSD at any given time (at least in the consumer space -- in the server space the 16TB 2.5&quot; Samsung SSD and the 60TB 3.5&quot; Seagate are both out of this world but so are their prices too).

Self-contradiction:<p><i>&quot;[the factory&#x27;s] closure will significantly reduce the company’s HDD output&quot;</i><p>...but a few sentences later:<p><i>&quot;the plant no longer makes products&quot;</i><p>How can a plant that no longer makes products would reduce the company&#x27;s output if closed?