RSSSeagate To Pursue Dual-Brand Strategy
By Ed Oswald | Published January 8, 2007, 9:50 AM
Following its December 2005 purchase of Maxtor, Seagate is setting out to differentiate the two brands to attendees of the Consumer Electronics Show at Las Vegas. Its Maxtor line would focus on storage and backup needs, while Seagate drives will focus on data mobility.
Even before the acquisition, Maxtor focused on data backup applications. In 2001, the company was responsible for creating one of the first one-touch backup systems for consumers. Through a new consumer campaign, Seagate plans to show off those strengths.
Seagate drives would be differentiated for their data mobility capabilities. The company plans to offer a program called FreeAgent, which would ease the process of data migration between devices. In addition, online storage would also be offered to drive owners.
"The whole idea with our dual-brand strategy is to clearly differentiate our Seagate and Maxtor brands for different market and customer needs and preferences," vice president and general manager Jim Druckrey said. "Seagate is all about your freedom and Maxtor is about saving your digital life."
According to Seagate, the company is the first in the storage industry to implement a dual-brand strategy. Through clearly differentiating each line, the company says it hopes to gain market share.
The first drives through this new initiative are expected to begin arriving in February, the company said.
Maxtor drives are notorious for mft corruption, why? Because they get HOT, real HOT. Not speaking for all models ofcourse.
I had one die on me, and while having a good'ol sook over it, I felt better when my friend said he saw a small puff of smoke and a tiny blue flame come out from his!
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|"Seagate is all about your freedom and Maxtor is about saving your digital life."
Neither of these translate in a way that makes me think their products will be at all different... seagate is about my freedom? what the hell does that mean? and maxtor is saving my digital life. was my digital life in jeopardy? oh nose!
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|I had a bad experience with maxtor a number of years ago, and now I don't use them.
We use The Seagate 750s for some apps, but mostly we use Western Digital, their 3 year warranty is what we need.
I still remember the call with a Maxtor Support Rep that terminated our business with them.
We only buy 200 drives a month so it's not a big deal to them, but hey, I will never own another maxtor. I hope that the Seagate hard drives continue to hold on to their quality.
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|Are Maxtor branded products going to be getting the Seagate 5-year warranty? Or is Seagate going to drop their warranty to the Maxtor 1-year warranty?
Right now, I only buy Seagate Hard Drives because of this. I hope they extend this to their Maxtor branded products as well and don't use this opportunity as an excuse to drop one of the best HDD warranties out there.
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|We had that same question about a year ago, and after talking to a few inside Seagate and the local Maxtor rep in Solana (Westlake-DFW), I was told that basically the Seagate and Maxtor units were the same - that the warranty was shaved simply so that they could offer them (the Maxtor) at a slightly better price point for OEM use.
Additionally they recommended both mirroring rather than relying on the MTBF ratings and also anticipating better price per performance for replacements when the drive failed. In other words, don't look to a warranty to safeguard your data - which, ironically also makes allot of sense.
Regarding what the real failure rates are - well, everyone seems to have their own experience.
But in any regards, Seagate seems to have a better reputation for reliability than Maxtor - which makes it a bit ironic that they would choose Maxtor as the brand to carry the data availability banner and Seagate to carry a 'mobility'(???) banner instead of the other way around.
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|Not interested in failure rates or data protection. I'm talking about replacement of the part 4 1/2 years down the road when it no longer spins up.
Long as Seagate keeps the 5yr warranty, I'm happy.
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|You do realise they warranty is a staggered one? They will not replace the drive @ 4 1/2 yrs.
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|Really? no, I hadn't heard that. I did get one replaced at 3 years.
*shrug*
Still better than most, and the drives, for the most part, are rock solid.
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|They will replace the drive at 4.5 years. I had a drive months away from an expired warranty (about 2 months away), that up and died when I put it on a firewire enclosure, and it was replaced for free.
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|any proof of this? as i see the terms of it pretty clearly on the paper with the drive, and they say nothing about it.
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