WD bought Hitachi for 4,3 billion USD

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MorgothPl

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According to CNBC, Hitachi is off the HDD market. Their whole unit has been bought by WD for $3,5 billion in cash and 750 million in stocks.

WD didn't say anything about their plans - if they just rebrand Hitachis into WD or will they keep separate brand.
 
oh my gawd, another one gone :(
Perhaps they will retain "Hitachi" as a product-label like "Western Digital Hitachi-Series 7200rpm übergreat"
 
Seagate-Maxtor was basically done just for Maxtor's customer list. Sad if this happens here since that would mean the end of great Hitachi drives.
 
Seagate produced Maxtors for a few years after their purchase. However Maxtors are now gone.
 
The strategic items on the menu

1. HDS Storage for Enterprise / Mainframe.

2. Hitachi Enterprise SSD co-developed with Intel.

Immediate access to premium markets.

Clarification : Hitachi GST is producing actual disk drives. Whereas HDS Storage is a separate entity that sells enterprise/mainframe grade storage array infrastructure to customers. With the purchase, I guess the proper description is now "WD has good will links to all the premium markets where WD can play aggressive role"
 
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Now only Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, and Toshiba left for well-known brands.

For new hard disks, either them or users may need to get familiar with China brands soon.

Or else the SSD from various makers.

Another impact is the 40TB demographic in the data storage forum. Maybe need to prepare for both WD/Hitachi RE Drives

For economy students : wikipedia Oligopoly
 
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I think this could be great. Both Hitachi and WD make good drives. I think together they could make really great drives and target Enterprise and SMB and SOHO better. WD always had a hard time getting into the Data Center space I know that much.
 
I would have been more impressed if WD bought a player in the SSD market.
 
It's going to suck if WD pulls their shit firmware shtick with the Hitachi drives... :(
 
Better get those raid-friendly drives while they are cheap, I'm expecting a 50-100% price increase in these type of drives :(
 
drescherjm said:
Seagate produced Maxtors for a few years after their purchase. However Maxtors are now gone.
Click to expand...

Seagate produced a few Maxtors, but most of the post-acquisition Maxtor branded stuff was actually Seagate internals.
 
Noooooo! Terrible news. This is like Apple acquiring Android, and crapping everything good about Android out the other side.
 
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
 
Seriously, looks like it's time to stock up on remaining Hitachi drives in channel before WD locks down, forces TLER on all consumer grade drives, and eliminates Hitachi drives from production...
 
alamone that's getting a bit ahead of reality :) there are already tons of new gen Hitachi drives in the supply chain, and I doubt we'll be seeing Hitachi drives running firmware written by WD, nor are we likely to see WD-branded Hitachi hardware running Hitachi firmware - at least not desktop/consumer SATA drives. Clearly WD wanted Hitachi's SAS market and tech because their own SAS offering blows hyena. But we'll have to wait for the details of the acquisition to shake out.
 
This news bothers me. As much as I like WD, I don't like them purchasing one of their primary rivals (and my 2nd choice in hard drives). Now I've only got one choice left for platter drives: Samsung. I refuse to ever touch Seagate again, and Toshiba has never impressed me. Bleh. Hopefully Samsung steps up to fill the void.
 
yeah +1 to 'this shit sucks' because WD will scrap hitachi's cheap large capacity RAID-able drives.
might have to stock up on a few more 2TB 5K3000 drives before WD starts pissing in the pool.
 
I've used Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate, WD and Hitachi and to be honest I've never noticed a difference except in performance (but that's because they have been form different generations of drives so obviously the newer drives are faster).
 
that ruins my day to. back in the day WD used to be the golden standard... back in the 1gb day that is.... I have had more wd drives crap out then i care to. many more then seagate and maxtor combined. i have about 15 drives laying around the house 2 are wd 1 being a old 1gb ish drive that outlasted 1 of its newer bretheren. got a 250gb that lasted about 1.5 years died and was replaced warranty the warranty drive died about 5 days after the 3yr end on waranty. i had 2 out of8 recent maxtor/seagate drives go south 1 a bit past waranty the other was replaced and is still going strong.

oh and dont get me started about WD Black series. those crap out on work pc's if you sneeze near them.

the other brands im indiferent on though seagate doesnt make the same lo cost quality that maxtor did hell i still have a good 450mb maxtor
 
Bumms me out & I have never bought a Hitachi drive. I Dont like WD (had 3 or 4 bad green drives in a row last year) & Toshiba's are king of lackluster. Now if Samsung starts to suck I will have no place to go.
 
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