Known for delivering premium external storage solutions engineered to meet the needs of the Apple Mac community, G-Technology by Hitachi today introduced its G-CONNECT wireless storage solution, the first in a family of products providing instant, wireless storage and 802.11n WiFi Internet access for your Apple iPad, iPhone and many other mobile devices. The G-CONNECT solution provides on-the-go wireless access to content that's not already loaded on your iOS devices, including your favorite movies, music, books, photos and documents. No Internet connection is required. G-CONNECT provides access to five+ simultaneous devices, depending on the workload, and supports up to five SD or three HD video streams at once.

When connected via Ethernet to a network, the G-CONNECT drive becomes your own personal cloud or WiFi Internet access point, allowing you to surf and stream content, wirelessly, at the same time. Access and view content on the G-CONNECT solution with a mobile iOS app, which will be available in the App Store, or through your browser. Android devices are also supported with access through a web browser, with native apps available this fall.

Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC) today reported revenue of $2.25 billion, hard-drive unit shipments of 50 million and net income of $146 million, or $0.62 per share, for its third fiscal quarter ended Apr. 1, 2011. The company's results include expenses of $10 million associated with the planned acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announced Mar. 7, 2011. Excluding the acquisition-related expenses, non-GAAP net income was $156 million or $0.66 per share.

In the year-ago quarter, the company reported revenue of $2.64 billion, shipped 51 million hard drives, and reported net income and earnings per share of $400 million and $1.71, respectively. The company generated $313 million in cash from operations during the March quarter, ending with total cash and cash equivalents of $3.2 billion.

Delivering solutions that better fit your increasing mobile and connected lifestyles, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) is expanding its family of external storage and backup solutions with its new line of Hitachi Touro Pro desktop and mobile external hard drives. Delivering two levels of protection--local backup and cloud storage, the Touro Pro line is an all-in-one solution to help protect, transport and store your photos, music, videos and documents for easy access from anywhere.

Coupling online storage and local personal storage is vital in today's mobile world. Your personal content and the public cloud are converging. Right in the middle of this is you. Your content. Your personal cloud - the stuff you want access to, from anywhere - online and from your tablet, smartphone, laptop or external drive.

Western Digital and Hitachi, Ltd. announced today that they have entered into a definitive agreement whereby WD will acquire Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST), 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.

Under the terms of the agreement, WD will acquire Hitachi GST for $3.5 billion in cash and 25 million WD common shares valued at $750 million, based on a WD closing stock price of $30.01 as of March 4, 2011. Hitachi, Ltd. will own approximately ten percent of Western Digital shares outstanding after issuance of the shares and two representatives of Hitachi will be added to the WD board of directors at closing. The transaction has been approved by the board of directors of each company and is expected to close during the third calendar quarter of 2011, subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals. WD plans to fund the transaction with a combination of existing cash and total debt of approximately $2.5 billion.

Committed to the growing market for cost-effective, capacity-optimized drives, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today introduced its new enterprise-class, 3.5-inch, 3TB Ultrastar 7K3000 drive family - the world's first and only 7,200 RPM drive family rated at 2.0 million hours MTBF and backed by a five-year limited warranty. The new Ultrastar 7K3000 drive family represents the fifth-generation of Hitachi's five-platter mechanical design, which has been stringently designed, tested and field proven for quality and reliability by global server and storage OEMs, as well as the most well known Internet giants worldwide.

With millions of five-platter Ultrastar drives shipped over the last three years, Hitachi's field reliability data shows an unprecedented AFR below 0.40 percent, exceeding customer and industry AFR quality specifications for a 7,200 RPM drive. By increasing the MTBF specification to 2.0 million hours, with an AFR 40 percent lower than drives rated 1.2 million hours MTBF, Hitachi enables data center managers to expect reduced failures, improved up-time and lowered TCO when using a large population of Ultrastar 7K3000 hard drives over a period of time.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced its new 500GB, 5,400 RPM Travelstar Z5K500 drive - the industry's highest capacity, one-disk, 7 millimeter (mm) z-height hard disk drive (HDD).

According to IDC, 500GB, mobile 2.5-inch drives represent 22 percent of the market today, with this capacity growing 42 percent annually from 2010 to 2013. Offered in a complete family of 500GB, 320GB and 250GB, which satisfies more than 77 percent of today's capacity needs in the portable PC market, these drives are the industry's only second-generation family of 5,400 RPM, 7mm z-height drives, which are designed as a direct replacement for standard 2.5-inch, 9.5mm drives in everything from external drives to laptops, netbooks and blade servers. All this combined puts the new Hitachi Travelstar Z5K500 drive family in the industry sweet spot of opportunity in the mobile 2.5-inch market.

A consortium led by Hitachi, including Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), a public-sector body that promotes research of energy-efficient technologies, National University Corporation Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Kyoto University, have developed a new hard drive data recording technology that promises to increase data density 8-fold.

The researchers have developed a new patterning technology for the magnetized bits that are laid on the platters, which are just 10 nm in size. This is made possible by using new materials, and making use of a self-arranged phenomenon of polymer materials. Its practical applications increases areal-density of disk platters to 3.9 Terabits per square inch, an 8-fold increase compared to the 500 Gigabits per square inch that's currently standard. This paves the way for 24 Terabyte (TB) hard drives in the very near future.

Leveraging more than 50 years of design and qualification experience, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced its new Ultrastar solid state drive (SSD) family. The new Ultrastar SSD400S family comes in 100GB, 200GB and 400GB capacities, featuring both 2.5-inch 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and 3.5-inch 4Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces. As the world's first jointly developed SAS and FC enterprise-class SSDs, the Ultrastar SSD400S family combines Hitachi's proven enterprise hard disk drive (HDD) expertise with Intel's extensive capabilities in developing high-endurance 34-nanometer (nm), single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory and advanced SSD technology. This combination provides unique value to customers who are increasingly looking to tiered storage as a method of managing the escalating performance, capacity, endurance and reliability demands of today's data centers.

"Hitachi's strategic investment and commitment in the enterprise market is evident with the new Ultrastar SSD family. Our new SSD product family not only symbolizes our market opportunity to serve evolving cloud data center infrastructures, but also delivers value to our customers in terms of increasing data center performance and reducing total cost of ownership," said Mike Cordano, executive vice president of Worldwide Sales and Marketing, Hitachi GST. "We have a strong track record of working with global enterprise customers and are proud to report favorable responses to the Ultrastar SSD400S family. With qualifications now underway, we anticipate volume shipments to commence in the first half of 2011."

Hitachi listed two of its new mammoth-capacity hard drives on its website, the Deskstar 7K3000 and Deskstar 5K3000. These drives are available in capacities of up to 3 TB; 2 TB and 1 TB variants are also available. The drives have spindle speeds of 7200 rpm (for the 7K3000) and 5400 rpm (for the 5K3000). Available in the 3.5-inch form factor, these drives use the SATA 6 Gb/s interface, but are backwards compatible with SATA 3 Gb/s and 1.5 Gb/s. The 7K3000 uses a 64 MB cache, while the 5K3000 makes do with 32 MB. Both drives have default sector sizes of 512 bytes. The company is yet to reveal pricing.

Portable storage has never looked so good with the new G-Technology G-DRIVE slim from Hitachi GST. Just in time for the holidays, and making a perfect external storage companion to the Apple Macbook, MacBook Pro or Macbook Air, the new G-DRIVE slim external hard drive gives users 320GB of storage and ubiquitous USB 2.0 connectivity in an amazingly slim form factor. The new drive is designed from the inside out to emulate G-Technology's known quality and style for the Apple Mac market, providing simple, reliable and affordable external storage for college students, business professionals and consumers on the go.

The new G-DRIVE slim leverages Hitachi GST's rugged, 7mm Travelstar Z5K320 drive, making it the thinnest, 2.5-inch external hard drive in the world. With its diminutive footprint - just a mere 128.6 mm (L) x 82 mm (W) by 9.9 mm (H), - sleek design and recyclable aluminum enclosure, users now have a stylish drive to help them move, work and play with their digital content. Lightweight and compact, weighing in at approximately 144g (5 oz), users can easily carry up to 80 hours of high-definition video, 320 hours of standard video, 114 movies, 80,000 songs or 160 games wherever they go.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced the industry's fastest and most power-efficient, 10K RPM, 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Enterprise hard drive, the Hitachi Ultrasta C10K600. The new 2.5-inch, 600 GB Hitachi drive delivers up to 15 percent better random and 18 percent faster sequential performance than competitive products on the market today 1. The Ultrastar C10K600 drive also sets a new standard for energy-efficiency with an operating power specification that is at least 22 percent lower than the competition2. Built on a field-proven platform to ensure greater reliability and reduced qualification time, these compact Ultrastar drives deliver the power, performance and high storage density requirements for Tier 1, Enterprise networked storage arrays, blades and other rack-mounted servers.

The Ultrastar C10K600 drive family is offered in 300GB, 450GB and 600GB versions, providing capacity parity with 3.5-inch drives. At 2.5-inches, these small form factor drives occupy 70 percent less physical space and consume 65 percent less power than Hitachi's 3.5-inch enterprise hard drives. Their capacity and performance attributes allow users to transition seamlessly from larger storage systems to more efficient designs based on 2.5-inch drives. The resulting higher density servers and storage arrays reduce space requirements, lower cooling costs and reduce the total cost of ownership.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced its new 375GB/platter, 5,400 RPM and 7,200 RPM, 2.5-inch hard drives - the Travelstar 5K750 and the Travelstar 7K750 hard drive families. Featuring the industry's highest capacities in a standard 9.5mm two-disk design, the new drives come in capacities of 750GB, 640GB and 500GB. The drives are built on Hitachi's proven platform for quality and reliability, and feature innovative technology that delivers high shock protection, low power and fast performance for a variety of notebook computers, external storage solutions, gaming consoles and other mobile devices.

The Travelstar 5K750 and 7K750 drive families are the first Hitachi GST hard drives that feature Advanced Format. Advanced Format increases the physical sector size on hard drives from 512 bytes to 4096 (4K) bytes. This helps utilize the storage surface area more efficiently, allowing for increased drive capacities and improved data integrity at higher storage densities. By integrating Hitachi drives with the new Advanced Format, IT managers, system integrators and OEMs can take advantage of the latest operating systems to deliver new high-capacity, power-efficient systems.

Hitachi GST showed off its first solid state drive (SSD) to the public, at the Hitachi uValue 2010 convention held in Tokyo. The company made its entry with an enterprise-grade SSD, expected to carry the UltraStar label which the company's high speed (15,000 rpm) enterprise hard drives carry. The SSD comes in the 2.5" form-factor, with serial-attached SCSI (SAS) and fiber-channel arbitrated loop (FCAL) interfaces, becoming only the next SSD-maker after STEC to offer FCAL. While no storage capacity figures were quoted, the drives are expected to come in capacities ranging from 64 GB to 512 GB. Hitachi GST is popular hard drive maker, known more for its enterprise-grade hard drives, than its consumer-desktop products.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced the industry's broadest family of ultra slim and light 7mm z-height drives. Whether customers need a slim 7mm drive that is the highest capacity, fastest or tuned precisely for A/V streaming, the new Hitachi Z-series family of Travelstar and CinemaStar drives delivers on the company's proven strengths of reliability, low-power consumption, exceptional shock resistance and quiet acoustics. With the entire family offered in capacities up to 320GB - the industry's highest 7mm drive capacity in a one-disk design - Hitachi is at the forefront, leading the shift from 9.5mm 2.5-inch drives to 7mm 2.5-inch drives across a broad range of market segments.

From laptops and handhelds to PVRs and blade servers, Hitachi's new 7mm Z-series family of Travelstar and CinemaStar drives are designed as a direct replacement for today's standard 2.5-inch, 9.5mm hard drives. All Hitachi Z-series drives feature common connectors and common mounting points for simple integration into existing systems, and enable greater design flexibility to differentiate and meet market demands for new, thinner, lighter and more robust devices.

As many as nine major chip vendors were fined a total of 331 million Euros (US $404.2 million) for participating in illegal price-fixing activities, by the European Union authorities. These include Samsung, Hynix, Nanya, Elpida, Infineon, NEC, Toshiba, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi. A 10th company in this price-fixing cartel was Micron Technology, which escaped the fine for exposing the malpractice to the EU authorities. Of these Samsung was given the single biggest fine of 146 million Euros, followed by Infineon at 57 million Euros. The fines were reduced by 10% because all companies extended cooperation in the investigations.

The price-fixing cartel mostly involved bad trade of DRAM chips, and was active between 1998 and 2002, operating with a network of contacts which secretly exchanged pricing information. They colluded to fix prices of DRAM chips sold to major PC and server manufacturers. Investigations in the scam began in 2002 when Micron blew the whistle on the cartel. "By acknowledging their participation in a cartel the companies have allowed the Commission to bring this long-running investigation to a close and to free up resources to investigate other suspected cartels," said EU's Competition Commissioner, Joaquin Almunia. "As the procedure is applied to new cases it is expected to speed up investigations significantly," he added.

As an ongoing supporter of professional content creators both large and small, G-Technology by Hitachi : is aligning with today's premiere filmmakers and creative professionals as an official Leadership Sponsor of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, January 21-31, 2010, in Park City, Utah.

Making its debut at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival is G-Tech's new G-DRIVE mobile family of portable hard drives - the G-DRIVE mobile USB : and the G-DRIVE mobile. Each is specifically designed for Apple users who strive for external storage solutions that complement their Mac lifestyle. The new G-DRIVE mobile USB is designed to match the silky white design of the new MacBook and features a USB 2.0 interface for reliable storage on the go. The new G-DRIVE mobile, with FireWire 800 and USB 2.0, features a polished black and silver appearance, making it a perfect companion for the new MacBook Pro.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced the availability of the newly designed SimpleDrive desktop external hard drive with capacities of up to two terabytes (2TB). In addition, the company announced that all of its 3.5-inch retail drives are now available in 2TB capacities, featuring the Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000, the industry's first 2TB 7,200 RPM hard drive that blends performance and high capacity with low power features. New, upgraded solutions include the Hitachi SimpleTech Pro Drive; the two-drive, RAID 0/1 Duo Pro Drive; and the Hitachi Internal Hard Drive Kit for the do-it-yourself (DIY) computer-upgrade market. All products are now available.

"Hitachi continues to build its channel presence with an expanded portfolio of 2TB storage solutions for business users, consumers or virtually anyone who needs additional capacity to manage the growing number and size of their digital files," said Azmat Ali, vice president of marketing, Branded Business, Hitachi GST. "Even though people are inundated with digital content daily, many are not taking the necessary precautions to safeguard their content. Our external drives, together with consistent backup practices, will help people keep their digital memories, entertainment and business documents safe."

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced worldwide availability of two new 15,000 RPM Ultrastar hard drives for Tier 0/1, mission-critical, enterprise storage applications. The new drives include the Ultrastar C15K147, Hitachi's first 15,000 RPM, 2.5-inch 6 Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drive, and the new 600GB Ultrastar 15K600, the company's fourth generation 3.5-inch drive with either 6 Gb/s SAS or 4Gb/s Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FCAL) interfaces. To help enterprises protect sensitive data and comply with privacy and data protection regulations, Hitachi now offers industry-compliant, self-encrypting, enterprise-class hard drives as an option across all of its 10,000 and 15,000 RPM Ultrastar drives.

While enterprise operating costs continue to escalate, most IT budgets are either flat or trending downward. At the same time, enterprise data is proliferating at an unabated rate and sensitive data must be protected. These factors combine to make storage efficiency, data protection and return on assets (ROA) among the most pressing concerns for today's data center managers. In these environments, every possible technique must be applied to achieve maximum value, efficiency and security. This could mean applying tiered storage methods, implementing encryption technologies, reducing power, maximizing cooling while minimizing space requirements, or obtaining maximum performance out of individual components and systems.

Building on years of innovation, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced that is it shipping its fifth-generation, 7200 RPM mobile hard disk drive. The Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 is a 500GB, 2.5-inch, 3Gb/s SATA drive designed for notebooks, gaming systems and professional external storage solutions. Combining leadership performance, ruggedness and capacity, Travelstar 7K500 is ideal for multitasking, gaming and other graphic-intensive applications. The new Travelstar 7K500 is the fastest hard drive in its class and delivers up to 56 percent higher capacity and 16 percent better application performance than its predecessor. It also provides best-of-breed operating shock and outstanding power management for sturdy, unplugged notebook performance.

"Portable PC shipment growth continues to be one of the most significant market drivers underpinning 2.5-inch disk drive demand, and is a major reason why IDC expects the 2.5-inch mobile HDD market will grow at a 16.8 percent 2008-2013 compound annual growth rate," said John Rydning, research director for hard disk drives at IDC. "Hitachi's new 500GB mobile 2.5-inch HDD with a 7,200 rpm spin-speed provides PC OEMs an opportunity to differentiate PCs with both capacity and performance."

Leveraging its proven, fourth-generation high-capacity hard drive technology, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced that it is now shipping the industry's first enterprise-class, 7200 RPM 2TB offering, the Ultrastar A7K2000. The new Hitachi GST Ultrastar A7K2000 is designed, manufactured and tested to ensure enterprise-class mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) of 1.2 million hours in demanding 24x7 nearline applications. With a combination of high capacity and reliability, 7200 RPM performance, low power, and enterprise-class features, the Ultrastar A7K2000 drive is the ideal enterprise SATA drive for applications such as data warehousing, disk-to-disk backup, cloud computing and massive scale-out storage implementations where storage density, GB-per-watt and cost-per-GB are critical parameters.

TDK Japan, a supplier of read-write heads for hard-drive manufacturers predicts that 2.5 hard drives will be a reality by late 2009, and will reach markets by early 2010. The company presented a roadmap to the press late last week, that shows that it will have the technology available to produce 3.5 inch disk platters with 640 GB data density. Four such platters will go into making 2.5 TB drives. On the 2.5 inch drive front, the roadmap shows a jump to 320 GB per platter density, which allows 640GB 2-platter SFF drives to be announced by manufacturers towards the end of this year.

Hard Drive manufacturers had reached the 2 TB milestone earlier this year. Seagate and Western Digital used four 500 GB platters in their products. At this rate of data density increases, a 5 TB hard drive in 2010, as predicted by Hitachi's Yoshihiro Shiroishi last year, sounds a little more realistic.

Continuing its tradition of being first-to-market with industry leading hard drives, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced that it is now shipping the world's first, two terabyte (2TB), 7200 RPM hard disk drive (HDD). The new, colossal, 2TB Deskstar 7K2000 blends high performance and high capacity with low power and other eco-friendly features designed to enable Energy-Star rated computers and other high performance desktop systems.

Leveraging a solid track record for reliability, the new Deskstar 7K2000 is now in its fourth-generation using the company's unique five-platter design with relaxed bit density and proven perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology. Couple this with an ultra-quiet operation, a 32MB cache and a 3Gb/s SATA interface, and the new Deskstar 7K2000 is the ideal desktop drive for power users, gamers or anyone looking for a big, fast hard drive.

As one of the world's most recognized and trusted brands, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today unveiled three new consumer products following the acquisition of SimpleTech by Fabrik earlier this year. The new Hitachi branded products include the SimpleTOUGH portable USB drive, industry's only water-resistant and shock-resistant external hard drive from a global hard drive manufacturer; the stylish and colorful SimpleDRIVE Mini portable USB drive; and the SimpleNET network storage adapter for easily sharing existing USB drive content over a home or office network. All SimpleTech external storage solutions now leverage Hitachi's award-winning, reliable hard drives and strong global brand creating additional advantages for road warriors, prosumers, small office/home office (SOHO) users, or virtually anyone looking for a simple and reliable way to store, protect, and better manage their data.

Western Digital today announced that it has agreed to sell the assets of its media substrate manufacturing facility in Sarawak, Malaysia, to a subsidiary of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, the hard drive manufacturing unit of Hitachi, Ltd. The employees of WD at the facility will become employees of the purchaser. The transaction is expected to close in the current quarter, subject to customary closing conditions. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
WD announced in December that it was taking actions to realign its cost structure to match a softer demand environment. This divestiture is one of those steps. The Sarawak facility, at which WD manufactured aluminum substrates for hard drive magnetic media, was acquired by WD as part of its acquisition of Komag, Inc. in September 2007. WD is consolidating substrate operations from the Sarawak facility into its other substrate facility in Johor, Malaysia. WD will continue to manufacture the majority of its magnetic media requirements at existing facilities in Malaysia and source the balance of its media needs through its strategic external partners.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) announced that it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Lenovo to continue its long-standing relationship as a supplier of hard disk drives (HDD) for the development of PCs and notebooks on a worldwide basis. The MOU was signed at the "2009 U.S.-China Trade and Investment Cooperation Forum" taking place during the Chinese Ministry of Commerce's customary, commercial purchasing delegation visit to the United States, which aims to improve the trade balance between China and the United States.