Josh Oakhurst has an in-depth analysis of Seagate’s recent all-stock acquisition of Maxtor. The merger officially occurred earlier this year, with substantial integration of Maxtor operations into Seagate to be completed by early 2007.

Seagate says the merger “has the enhanced scale and capacity to better drive technology advances and accelerate delivery of a wide range of differentiated products and cost-effective solutions to a growing customer base.â€? Oakhurst also notes that Seagate’s projected $300 million a year in operating-cost savings are probably directly related to worldwide Maxtor employee layoffs.

So what impact will this merger have on the Production and Editing fields? Josh rightly states that Maxtor’s warranty was/is 1-year, and Seagate’s is 5yr. Big difference, and I don’t personally believe those numbers were chosen arbitrarily.

I know from my own personal experiences that Maxtor hard disk drives have a MUCH greater incidence of drive failure and disk corruption than Seagate hard drives. In fact, I can only recall a single Seagate hard drive (that I personally have used) that has failed me, and it wasn’t massive failure. I had the disk RMA’d as soon as I detected bad clusters.

On the other hand, I can recount no less than 4 Maxtor hard drives that I’ve had to get replaced due to drive failure or corruption, and 1 HDD that died almost immediately after the warranty expired. Cruel fate, and it serves me right for buying drives that were on sale. Pop quiz time…guess which brand drives I buy now? But now that Maxtor and Seagate are merging, can we expect the quality of Maxtor drives to go up, or will Seagate undermine it’s own quality track record and begin to produce drives of lesser reliability? Oh, and did you know that Apple is a large consumer of Seagate hard disks?

Check out the rest of the article for further Oakhurst musings, and his insightful perspective on competition and market pricing.