Western Digital to Pay $4.3B for Hitachi Drive Unit

H

HardOCP News

[H] News
Joined
Dec 31, 1969
Messages
0
Western Digital is buying Hitachi's drive unit for a whopping $4.3B in cash and stock ($3.5B cash, $750M stock). Here's a quote from the official press release:

Western Digital and Hitachi, Ltd. announced today that they have entered into a definitive agreement whereby WD will acquire Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., in a cash and stock transaction valued at approximately $4.3 billion. The proposed combination will result in a customer-focused storage company, with significant operating scale, strong global talent and the industry's broadest product lineup backed by a rich technology portfolio.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
I wonder who WD will purchase next, or for that matter, who will Seagate purchase?
 
Frist Hitatchi buys out IBM's Deathstar hard drives. Now Western Digital buys out Hitatchi. Sounds like they bought a lemon.
 
Just thank god Seagate didn't touch anything..... we dodged a bullet guys
 
niconx said:
Frist Hitatchi buys out IBM's Deathstar hard drives. Now Western Digital buys out Hitatchi. Sounds like they bought a lemon.
Click to expand...

Hitachi are actually pretty good drives, the Deathstar was a very long time ago, back when a 60GB drive was considered a large drive. I have 500GB one I bought a few years ago, and at the time it out performed all other drives in it's size category.
 
I personaly love Hitachi and their quality of drives they have been putting out, WD on the otherhand I always seem to get drives plagued with problems.
Hopefully this acquisition does not make me start hating Hitachi.
 
niconx said:
Frist Hitatchi buys out IBM's Deathstar hard drives. Now Western Digital buys out Hitatchi. Sounds like they bought a lemon.
Click to expand...

I had a early deskstar that I bought in ~1999-2000 some time. A 34Gig drive back when computers were shipping with A LOT less..

All my friends at the time made fun of me for wasting my money on so much storage. What would I ever use it for?

Turns out I used it well :p A few years later when WD's 100Gig drives were first launched, I got two of them and raided them :p

Anyway, the point of this story was that early Desktars were actually quite solid. Mine is still running 12 years later. The problem hit on later drives, and it was a shame as it really killed what previously had been a rather good hard drive division at IBM.
 
Bone_Enterprise said:
I personaly love Hitachi and their quality of drives they have been putting out, WD on the otherhand I always seem to get drives plagued with problems.
Hopefully this acquisition does not make me start hating Hitachi.
Click to expand...

There will be no more Hitachi at some point.
 
Met-AL said:
Hitachi are actually pretty good drives, the Deathstar was a very long time ago, back when a 60GB drive was considered a large drive. I have 500GB one I bought a few years ago, and at the time it out performed all other drives in it's size category.
Click to expand...

I have a stack of dead Hitachi drives on my desk. In my experience they fail far more often than any other manufacturer.
 
Western Digital > Hitachi -> IBM DeathStar
Seagate > Maxtor -> Quantum Fireball
Toshiba -> Fujitsu
Samsung -> ???


About rite?
 
well hell I guess WD will have crapy drives now :( I wonder what I should buy now...
 
Of the 4 WD drives I have none have ever failed. Of the 4 Samsung drives I have ever had they all failed.
 
niconx said:
Of the 4 WD drives I have none have ever failed. Of the 4 Samsung drives I have ever had they all failed.
Click to expand...

I must just have good luck with hard drives then.

In my 20 or so years of building my own computers I have never had a hard drive of any brand fail. :p

I've had Conner's, Seagate's, Quantum's, IBM's, Maxtors in the past, and currently have a bunch of WD's and one Seagate.(not to mention 2 OCZ SSD's and one Supertalent SSD) None have ever failed prior to reaching the end of their useful life.

I do have 3*2TB+1*1TB WD drives currently in my NAS in a Raid 5 equivalent dual disk redundancy mode just in case though :p
 
Crap....I love their 2TB drives. Back to WD I guess, just wish their price point would get better.
Posted via Mobile Device
 
Western Digital can finally say....
2eelo20.png
 
Superdemon said:
I have a stack of dead Hitachi drives on my desk. In my experience they fail far more often than any other manufacturer.
Click to expand...

More than Maxtor?
Every time a drive dies in one of the old desktops at the office, it's almost always a Maxtor.
I've also had several Seagates, and a couple Western Digital drives die.

I've yet to have a Hitachi drive fail on my.
The only 2TB drives I use in my servers are the Hitachi UltraStars.
 
It'll take 5 years to integrate Hitachi into WD. The first 2 years will be figuring out which parts of Hitiachi to keep and which tech to pilfer and they will coexist. Then the next 3 years will be stop selling the hitachi name and wait for the current warranties to die out.

Like mentioned Maxtor. It only took seagate a couple of years to run that name out of the market after they purchased them.
 
niconx said:
Frist Hitatchi buys out IBM's Deathstar hard drives. Now Western Digital buys out Hitatchi. Sounds like they are still a lemon.
Click to expand...

Fixed it for you.

Western Digital, crappy drives with even crappier customer service.
 
Zarathustra[H];1036941172 said:
I had a early deskstar that I bought in ~1999-2000 some time. A 34Gig drive back when computers were shipping with A LOT less..

All my friends at the time made fun of me for wasting my money on so much storage. What would I ever use it for?

Turns out I used it well :p A few years later when WD's 100Gig drives were first launched, I got two of them and raided them :p

Anyway, the point of this story was that early Desktars were actually quite solid. Mine is still running 12 years later. The problem hit on later drives, and it was a shame as it really killed what previously had been a rather good hard drive division at IBM.
Click to expand...

A lot of the problem is if companies find a flaw, they should take ownership, become proactive. Lot more respect and repeat customers. Take the hit on the bottom line and really show the customer you care about the situation. Forgot to mention, don't give the bean counters so much power.
 
I think it would have been smarter for WD to invest in buying SSD manufacturers, not another Hard drive manufacturer.
The reason Hitachi sold off their Hard drive division was because they see it as a dying market, primarily due to the current transition to solid state drives, which has been steadily eating into the demand for Hard Drives, especially for portables, and media devices.
 
Hofy said:
Fixed it for you.

Western Digital, crappy drives with even crappier customer service.
Click to expand...

I RMA'd a WD drive a few months back from a customer that had bought a new drive because they couldn't wait a a few days to get a replacement drive via RMA.
I ended up with a dead drive that still had a few months left on the warranty.
WD upgraded it from a Blue to a Black series drive. Turn around was very quick.

That was the first WD drive I have had to RMA since 2001.. .and I have worked on thousands of computers since then.
 
interested said:
The reason Hitachi sold off their Hard drive division was because they see it as a dying market, primarily due to the current transition to solid state drives, which has been steadily eating into the demand for Hard Drives, especially for portables, and media devices.
Click to expand...

These comments are so stupid. Go buy some SSDs and run a 10tb storage server with them if you like that theory so much.
 
dd0512 said:
These comments are so stupid. Go buy some SSDs and run a 10tb storage server with them if you like that theory so much.
Click to expand...

That is true today, but when businesses make certain decisions - especially when it comes to divestiture and acquisitions - they are looking at the financial picture quite a bit down the road, maybe as much as 10-20 years.

I wouldn't be surprised if mechanical hard drives are a scarce commodity in that time frame.
 
One thing people have to remember, is that the Hitachi in the story is technically HitachiGST, which is the division that bought out IBMs harddrive arm. Which in itself was funny, because the early Desk/Travel/Ultrastar lines were made by HitachiGST for IBM.

I can see in the near future, Seagate buying out Samsung's disk division...
 
Hofy said:
Fixed it for you.

Western Digital, crappy drives with even crappier customer service.
Click to expand...

Matter of total personal opinion. I only sell WD drives after the Seagate 7200.xx (.11's IIRC) fiasco. We were sending Seagate drives on a regular basis that just flat croaked. I haven't RMA'd a WD drive since we changed over. Our entire line, from notebook to desktop, IDE and SATA, is all WD now.

As for customer service, since we are a relseller, we go get enhanced perks dealing with RMA's, but never had any issues with RMA's at all.
 
I wish I bought WDC stock last week, its up over 12% after the news.

Consumers (i.e. most of the people here) see so little of the total volume of drives in production its hard to form a solid/reliable opinion on overall reliability.

Personally I've never had a Hitachi drive fail (deathstars from 10+ years ago dont count) though Ive only used a few of them in recent times. I've used plenty of WD, Seagate and Samsung drives over the years, and Ive had more problems with Seagate than any of them. What does it mean? Nothing really.
 
Hitachi DeathStar + WD Blue = OMG my drive is dead
WD has some decent lones but their blue drives suck the big one
Had two die in the last six months...have one still functional

Never had a Samsung drive die except one which arrived DOA. Replacement from the Egg is still perfect. Probably had 8 of them with 3 still in my possession
 
I hope WD wises up and changes the Deathstar/Deskstar brand name that Hitachi foolishly didn't when they bought it from IBM.
 
dd0512 said:
These comments are so stupid. Go buy some SSDs and run a 10tb storage server with them if you like that theory so much.
Click to expand...

^Exactly^ Show me where I can get 2 tera ssd for $79.00 for storage.
 
dd0512 said:
These comments are so stupid. Go buy some SSDs and run a 10tb storage server with them if you like that theory so much.
Click to expand...

You carry around a 10TB hard drive storage system with you, on your phone, tablet, netbook, laptop, etc..??

It is a well established fact that just about all portable devices have started transitioning to SSD. This transition has directly cut into the sales of mechanical hard drives in this ever growing electronics segment, which was once serviced by WD, Seagate, Hitachi etc.., until SSD/Flash storage took over.

From a business perspective, you want to keep your company in as many growth segments of the market as possible, which is what the portable segment is. So looking down the road 10 or 20 years, you would want to ensure you can provide a product that is still open to new markets.

So while Hard drives are still king in the Server and large PC world, they are no longer even thought of in highly portable electronics (phones/tablets etc..).

Sorry if you think that is stupid.
 
interested said:
So while Hard drives are still king in the Server and large PC world, they are no longer even thought of in highly portable electronics (phones/tablets etc..)
Click to expand...

The key is "highly portable", where storge needs are limited, and low weight/size is more important than cost/speed.

I receintly started deploying 750GB drives in some of our laptops. Cost is less than <$100 per drive.
A 500GB SSD (largest I could find), while alot faster, would have cost over 10x as much, for only 2/3 the storage.

It would be eaiser for me to justify SSD's on the office desktops since most the data is stored on the server. Most the older desktops are still running with only 40GB drives and plently of free space.

For the office I'd like to see a small/cheap desktop PC with a low power i3/i5 CPU, 4GB ram and 60-80GB SSD. No slots, no DVD, no floppy drive needed, just a GB ethernet, dual monitor VGA/DVI ports and several USB ports for keyboards, mouse, etc.
 
JMccovery said:
I wonder who WD will purchase next, or for that matter, who will Seagate purchase?
Click to expand...

I think Seagate are still writhing in pain from the patent infringement against them, I think that was a WD patent to do with the fluid bearing...I don't hold Seagate in a high regard anyway, Samsung, Hitachi, or WD are my choices, in that order.
 
everyone has his own story. it's a crapshoot for every brand.

since 1998, i have lost one maxtor 10gb 3.5", and a hitachi 20gb 2.5".

all my other maxtors and seagates have been fine. I am still using a 9 year old japanese maxtor, and my seagate is now 5 years old.
 
Superdemon said:
I have a stack of dead Hitachi drives on my desk. In my experience they fail far more often than any other manufacturer.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah? Well I got two stacks of other brands of drives.

One time at band camp......
 
I wonder if Seagate and Samsung might merge or if Seagate takes Toshiba...Or Samsung takes Toshiba...
We might just end up with 3 big drive manufacturers while SSD/flash media takes over...
It will be interesting to see which SDD/flash media companies overtake the market and if the Big drive makers buy them out...

Every drive fails and all brands have crappy models/production lines, it's just a combination of how badly Newegg didn't pack it, how often the kids in the warehouse kicked it around, and how lucky your computer is.

When in doubt, duplicate... if it's important, have multiple copies on multiple drives on multiple mediums. Lots Of Copies, Keep Stuff Safe...
 
nutzo said:
More than Maxtor?
Every time a drive dies in one of the old desktops at the office, it's almost always a Maxtor.
Click to expand...

Yeah, this has been my experience as well. Haven't had problems outside of normal numbers with Hitachi, WD, or Seagate, but then again 100 or so drives isn't a big enough subset for me to able to make an educated guess on total drive reliability numbers.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top