Seagate Technology
Seagate Technology Holdings plc is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979.[2] Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Fremont, California, United States.
Company type
Shugart Technology
November 1, 1979 (as Shugart Technology)
- Alan Shugart
- Tom Mitchell
- Doug Mahon
- Finis Conner
- Syed Iftikar
Fremont, California, United States (operational)
Dublin, Ireland (legal domicile)
Worldwide
Michael R. Cannon (Chairman)
Dave Mosley (CEO)
US$7.38 billion (2023)
−US$342 million (2023)
−US$529 million (2023)
US$7.56 billion (2023)
−US$1.2 billion (2023)
33,400 (2023)
Seagate developed the first 5.25-inch hard disk drive (HDD), the 5-megabyte ST-506, in 1980. They were a major supplier in the microcomputer market during the 1980s, especially after the introduction of the IBM XT in 1983. Much of their growth has come through their acquisition of competitors. In 1989, Seagate acquired Control Data Corporation's Imprimis division, the makers of CDC's HDD products. Seagate acquired Conner Peripherals in 1996, Maxtor in 2006, and Samsung's HDD business in 2011. Today, Seagate, along with its competitor Western Digital, dominates the HDD market.
Partnerships and acquisitions[edit]
Finis Conner left Seagate in early 1985 and founded Conner Peripherals, which originally specialized in small-form-factor drives for portable computers. Conner Peripherals also entered the tape drive business with its purchase of Archive Corporation. After ten years as an independent company, Conner Peripherals was acquired by Seagate in a 1996 merger.[82]
In 2005, Seagate acquired Mirra Inc., a producer of personal servers for data recovery. It also acquired ActionFront Data Recovery Labs, which provides data recovery services.[83]
In 2006, Seagate acquired Maxtor in an all-stock deal worth $1.9 billion, and afterwards continued to market the separate Maxtor brand.[84] The following year, Seagate acquired EVault[83] and MetaLINCS, later rebranded as i365.[85]
In 2014, Seagate acquired Xyratex, a storage systems company, for approximately $375 million.[86][87] The same year, it acquired LSI's flash enterprise PCIe flash and SSD controller products, and its engineering capabilities, from Avago for $450 million.[88][89]
In October 2015, Seagate acquired Dot Hill Systems, a supplier of software and hardware storage systems, for approximately $696 million.[90]
Controversies[edit]
In 2015, Seagate's NAS drives—a type of wireless storage device—was found to have an undocumented hardcoded password.[91]
On January 21, 2014, numerous tech articles around the globe published findings from the cloud storage provider Backblaze that Seagate hard disks are least reliable among prominent hard disk manufacturers.[92][93][94] However, the Backblaze tests have been criticized for having a flawed methodology that has inconsistent environment variables, such as ambient temperatures, vibration, and disk usage.[95][96] In addition, Backblaze's statistics show that the vast majority of their installed drives are manufactured by Seagate, and Backblaze editor Andy Klein has noted "that a large number of new Seagate drives being deployed could be statistically responsible" for failure rate data in their specific datacenter population.[97] In the broader landscape, Seagate enterprise drives were named "most reliable" for seven years running in the IT Brand Pulse survey of top IT professionals, and cited as the leader for the previous two years in every measured category: reliability, performance, innovation, price, and service and support.[98] In 2019, Backblaze released updated statistics which reported that Seagate drives had the most failures in Q2 2019, whereas its best-rated drives were made by Toshiba.[99]
In October 2021, a report by U.S. Senate Republicans claimed that Seagate violated Export Administration Regulations by selling parts and components to Huawei following U.S. sanctions against the Chinese telecommunications company.[100] The company received another letter in August 2022 from the U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) for allegedly violating export sanctions to sell Huawei hard drives. Seagate denied any violations claiming that its foreign-made hard drives are not subject to the restriction since the disks and the equipment to make them were not a direct product of any American semiconductor technology or software.[101][72] In April 2023, Seagate reached a settlement agreement with the Department agreeing to pay $300 million—the largest civil penalty imposed by the BIS—for selling over 7.4 million hard drives to Huawei without BIS authorization. The resolution also included three stages of audits focusing on its export controls compliance program and a suspended denial order.[102][103]