Seagate Technology
Seagate Technology LLC is a manufacturer of hard drives and tape drives. The company's headquarters is located in Scotts Valley, California. Joined the company in Ireland. Seagate is the oldest and largest company in the independent disk manufacturer. Seagate has delivered since its inception until 2008 one billion hard drives with a total of 79 Exabyte storage space and gives its intention to deliver a further one billion hard drives in the next five years.
History
The company was founded in 1979 by Alan Shugart and Finis Conner. The first product was released in 1980, 5 megabytes comprehensive hard disk ST -506: the first hard drive in the 5.25- inch form factor. Sales were good and the company grew. Soon after Seagate introduced a 10 -megabyte version, the ST -506, ST -412, a. Later Seagate also developed hard drives for personal computers and IBM supplied in large numbers.
By 1980 years Seagate sold mainly hard drives that were improvements to the original design of the ST -506. The ST -225, a 20- megabyte hard disk, and the ST -251, a 40- megabyte hard disk, were the bestsellers of their time. Seagate hard drives have been referred to by some as cheap and unreliable. This call is returned to the use of stepper motors to position the heads. Many other manufacturers (for example Rodime, BASF, MiniScribe and Western Digital ) but also used stepper motors, some even in their first IDE models. Seagate gave up the use of stepper motors in the early 1990s. The ST351A / X, a 40- megabyte hard drive, which could be operated at the ATA as well as the XT bus, was the last disk in which a stepping motor was used.
Finis Conner left Seagate Technology in 1985 and in 1986 founded his own company, Conner Peripherals. Conner Peripherals specialized in small- form-factor hard drives for notebook and desktop computers, but also tape drives were produced by Conner. After ten years as an independent company Conner Peripherals went public in 1996 and again in Seagate Technology. In 1989, Seagate increased with the acquisition of the Storage division of Control Data in the high-end hard drive market.
In 1992, Seagate Barracuda the first 7,200 min-1 rotary speed. It was followed in 1996, the Cheetah, the first hard drive with 10,000 min -1. Followed in 2000 with the Seagate X15 the first hard drive with 15,000 min -1. Seagate introduced in 1997 with the " Medalist Pro" also the first ATA hard disk drive with 7,200 min -1.
End of 2005, Seagate announced its intention, through an exchange of shares with a volume of about 1.9 billion U.S. dollars to take over the company Maxtor Corporation. The acquisition was completed in May 2006, the Maxtor brand has been preserved for a time. Meanwhile, the Maxtor brand was discontinued, however, and the hard drive manufacturer Maxtor is therefore no longer existent.
In the late 1990s and again since mid-2005 Seagate gave up most of its hard drive models five-year warranty. From 3 January 2009 to December 2011 was a three-year warranty on PC and notebook hard drives for private clients. On 1 January 2012, the guarantee was reduced once more to 1 year, and again increased to two years since 1 July 2012. Different warranty periods apply to OEM customers and OEM Seagate drives it.
In August 2007, a Chinese company, Seagate tried to take over. The U.S. government saw the potential acquisition of the worldwide market leader for hard drives extremely critical. It was feared that China might manipulate hard drives in order to retrieve information.
Seagate offers since August 2008, a hard disk with 1.5 terabytes of capacity to, in 2010 there were already 2 terabytes, and shortly thereafter put a Seagate 3 terabyte hard drive before. Since late 2008, the Barracuda 7200.12 series is on the market in the discs are fitted with 500 GB for the first time. In September 2011, Seagate introduced the first hard drive manufacturer, an external 3.5 - inch hard drive with 4TB of storage.
In April 2011, Seagate bought the hard disk drive business of Samsung Electronics. In May 2012, Seagate acquired the French hard drive manufacturer LaCie.
Problems
At the turn of 2008/2009 showed that many models of the series were 7200.11 and 7200.12 produces erroneous. This could lead to a complete failure of the hard disk. However, the error could be corrected depending on the condition of the hard drive with a software update. This had to be requested by the user, since there were depending on model and condition tailored updates.