Perhaps their low end line is bad *because* they bought Maxtor. Their enterprise line is still just fine, been cruising at ~1.5% AFR here for the last 5 years with ~90% Seagate disks.
1.5% AFR on enterprise drives? Is that averaged over the 5 year period? If not, that's very high. Even is it is, it's still high.
The funny thing is that Seagate AFR on their low-end SATA is lower than their Enterprise SATA (0.34 vs. 0.73, see here and here (ES) section 2.12. I understand that they assume that enterprise drives are used more than the desktop drives, but nowhere do they say so. In fact, they say the low-end SATA is perfect for desktop RAID.
Not necessarily. The stars are aligned for this to happen. Look at these points:
1. Most iPods and iPhones are used by Windows users. You can deduce this by the sheer number of Windows machines over Macs.
2. Most users of iTunes have a love/hate relationship, specially those on Windows. (Ok. Maybe most hate it, except the Mac users) I have never seen such popular software remove the user SO MUST from the hardware it enables the user to use.
3. Google has the cash to undermine/underbid the iTunes store prices. Hell, they might even subsidize the cost of the media at the beginning, like they do everything else (note: They give everything away for free)
4. Google has the clout to convince record companies that this/competition will be a good thing.
All I can say is "About fucking time."
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
