News Western Digital to aquire Hitachi Global Storage

Western Digital has announced plans to acquire Hitachi's hard disk division for $4.3 billion.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/03/08/western-digital-to-aquire-hitachi-global-st/1

 

I love it when people say things like that - "$3.5 billion dollars in cash". I just imagine them actually turning up with that amount in hard currency!

 

They should measure cash in number of briefcases stuffed with £20 notes.

 

most analysts tend to agree this is good for the market. As market shrink, like mechanical storage interests usually consolidate. I don't think the HDD market was suffering from under diversity.

I've used Seagate WD and hitachi drives, so I'm happy. Mechanical storage is probably in it's last decade of being dominant anyways.

 

so what does Hitachi have, that WD wants? the enterprise market?

companies don't just go randomly purchase competitors.

 

- Their billions of dollars worth of market share?
- Purchasing a competitor means one less competitor to worry about.
- Because they can

 

SSDs are taking over.

 

No more DeathStars!

 

thats a good thing surely, lol

 

You have got it all wrong. We willll just get Velociraptor DeathStars - now guaranteed to fail, fast!

 

Question is:

OR

​

 

good for WD, horrible for us Consumers, less competition is never a good thing >.<

 

Tech, tech, and more tech. Like they are the first to engineer 1tb platters and so on.

 

This may also have something to do with it, why develop your own tech when you can just buy a company that already did the research for you?

 

This.

Hitachi has some great tech innovations but not the greatest manufacturing or brand. WD on the other hand is the opposite.

I bet Seagate are shitting themselves, esp. given its Hybrid drives are causing them so many headaches.

 

I have been buying and using deskstars for 10 years with only 1 (the 75gb deathstart) failing and 1 (2tb model) coming doa. The only other mechanical drives I have had was WD raptors and segate 15k sas drives. One of my first generation raptor drives is still alive and well but I hope that I still see the long life and performance I have always gotten from the deskstar line.

 

Reminds me of that bit in Dodgeball where he opens the suitcase with a million dollars in it, and it's actually this tiny wad of cash!

 

Most of the hdd failures I've had at work in the last year have been Western dig.

One of the labs we refitted last summer had 200 PCs in it. 6 WDC drives failed within a week, which is a relatively high percentage imo.
Apparently since they moved their factory to thailand a few years ago the ethos has been that it's cheaper to replace a faulty hdd than to build decent ones in the first place.

Good brand but rapidly going downhill in my estimation.

 

It's a good bit of business but it's a shame that a takeover will guarantee WD a loss next year, dunno what it is about big acquisitions that drive profit into the ground. I just happened to pick up a Caviar Blue for my other PC the day before this story broke but I just hope they get back some focus because that colour coding crap got on my nerves and I just bought the bargain Samsung last Christmas instead.

@ Rinseout - what "colour" were those failing WD drives? Took me ages to figure out that Blue stood for "the same drive you bought before we came up with this stupid new name".

 

If they do actually aquire Hitachi's hard disk division I really hope its just to buy out the competition and not to put anything from the Hitachi HDDs into their products. Just that I know a friend whos had bad experiences with Hitachi HDDs a few years ago.
But saying that I did have a problem with my 500GB WD Caviar green HDD after only 4 months use started to fail with bad sectors developing and not passing short HDD tests so sent it back to Scan to recieve a new one. I have backed up onto a spare Seagate just in case something happens to this new one. I am only using it as a mass storage not for running windows or games. Fingers crossed this one doesnt fail on me...