Thursday, January 22, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
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Seagate Barracuda hard drives plagued by failures
Seagate Barracuda hard drives plagued by failures
Numerous complaints are being reported from customers who own the 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive at the Seagate's online support forum.
The hard drive seems to just freeze during data transfers. Kabatek, Brown and Kellner LLP, a consumer law firm, is considering a lawsuit against Seagate because of the high failure rates of the Barracuda 7100.11.
Seagate, the world's largest Hard drive maker released the 3.5-inch internal drive, Barracuda 7200.11 in July 2008. The hard drive offers 1.5TB of capacity on four platters and uses a SATA 3GB/sec interface, delivering a sustained data rate of up to 120MB/sec. The drive is also available in 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB and 160GB capacities, with 32MB and 16MB Cache buffer size.
Seagate has stated that some other hard drive models like DiamondMax 22, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, SV35 are also affected by a firmware bug which makes the drive fail when the host system is powered on and the data becomes inaccessible.
Seagate is currently offering a free firmware upgrade for the affected drives. Customers can expedite assistance by calling Seagate Support(1-800-SEAGATE) or by sending an e-mail to Seagate. The e-mail should include the disk drive model number, serial number and current firmware revision which can be known by downloading the Seagate Drive Detect software program available in Seagate Knowledge Base.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
More AMD layoffs impact 1,100, execs to get pay cuts
The news is no better for AMD, which today confirmed it is letting go of 9% of those remaining employees who are not being transferred to The Foundry Company -- 200 by attrition, and an additional 900 by traditional termination.
This is in addition to the 600 being let go internationally announced last November (the original estimate was 500), and 1,600 whose "transitioning out" began earlier in 2008.
AMD spokesperson Michael Silverman told the press after the close of trading today, "As a result of the continuing global economic downturn, we have determined that we need to take difficult but prudent actions designed to reduce our costs...Beginning in February, we are undertaking several steps to lower costs, including temporarily reducing employee base pay and suspending some benefits programs."
Executive chairman Hector Ruiz (who also heads The Foundry Company) and CEO Dirk Meyer will also give themselves 20% pay cuts, though their base salaries have not been made public. Vice presidents will receive 15% pay cuts, and lower managers will receive lesser cuts.
It's worth asking at this point whether AMD will be able to carry out its ambitious transition plan away from the 45 nm generation of CPUs, with maybe only three-fourths the staff it had two years ago.
Source: Betanews
Samsung to divide into consumer and component divisions
Samsung announced today that it will split itself into two parts, with one new division to focus on consumer electronics items such as mobile phones and TVs and the other on semiconductors and LCDs.
The two new divisions will be led by executives with hefty experience in the two respective areas. Choi Gee-sun, now in charge of the new consumer products unit, headed up Samsung's mobile phone operations for the past two years.
During his tenure there, Samsung stepped past Motorola to become the world's second largest seller of mobile phones, trailing only Nokia. When Choi oversaw Samsung's television business before that, Samsung held the lead position in TVs worldwide.