Only goodness can come out of this :o

WHY would WD do this? Oh maybe they will finally make Hitachi a good HDD for once? Good thing WD is the best IMHO!

tricksonWHY would WD do this? Oh maybe they will finally make Hitachi a good HDD for once? Good thing WD is the best IMHO!

Hitachi is superior in enterprise market, that's why ;)

I don't see this as a good thing as it will lead to even less competition. It's more or less only Seagate vs. WD.

that's one way to get rid of the competition xd

Yes, WD is great for the consumer but in the enterprise not so much.

I support enterprise storage systems (NAS, SAN, DAS) Equallogic, EMC, Powervault. The WD Drives do have the most problems. EMC Doesnt use them, but they do use hitachi.. :)

its price is increased to double due to shortage and didn't get back

There goes HGST, They were quicker than WDs, They fixed all flaws with what IBM did. Such a :shadedshu

my last 3.5" hd purchace was a Hitachi and it performed very well for a long time until i sold it, it was a bit of a gamble after i was burned by the deathstar days, but it payed off, WD + HIACHI may not be so good for competition, but its gr8 fo quality of the end product when 2 pros work together

Only 2 left, that's quite bad.

xairamy last 3.5" hd purchace was a Hitachi and it performed very well for a long time until i sold it, it was a bit of a gamble after i was burned by the deathstar days, but it payed off, WD + HIACHI may not be so good for competition, but its gr8 fo quality of the end product when 2 pros work together

Hitachi wont exist after this merge. I honestly liked Hitachi drives for stability and speed, they were faster than the WDs

a 2MB cache 80 GB Hitachi vs 80GB 8MB cache WD- the Hitachi loaded windows faster, Loaded programs quicker. It was just snappier despite the lower cache level

Hitachi is down the tubes

Unlike other posters, I have a very negative post about Western Digital. Their Green and Blue drives don't last through the warranty period. I won't use them. Black is good.
Hitachi drives became exellent after they bought the DeathStar from IBM. Now, I fear WD will ruin them, just like Seagate has ruined every drive it purchased from other manufacturers. Quantum and Maxtor are gone, Samsung is next.

Now there will only be 2 disk drive manufacturers. Their consumer drives are junk for the most part, so if you want a reliable drive, you will have to buy an enterprise drive to get reliability.

WD Green drives die so quick because of the retarded 4 second head parking timer. They park their heads off of the platter(s) on a plastic ramp after just 4secs of inactivity.
I've seen 6 month old greens with over 150k load cycle counts in SMART.. ain't gonna last that way.

First thing I do on all WD Greens I get my hands on is disable that crap completely with WDIdle3.

Other alternative would be to buy AV series greens ("AV-GP") which don't have that timer to begin with (only the regular Green series do), but the AV-GP's are usually more expensive, so that's not really an option unless you can grab them cheap. (in relative terms.. pretty much all HDDs are still expensive as f*ck right now (Thailand flood fallout))