Western Digital to Acquire Hitachi Global Storage Technologies

[FreedomEclipse]

theres still 4 or more major manufacturers (from the top of my head) and all of them with the exception of Maxtor, all make solid products. its not that hard to choose from. they might be different companies but they make a RANGE of hard drives to choose from.



And with the SSD market taking off. who knows what will be of hard drives in 10-20years time.

 

[HalfAHertz]

Has there ever been much competition in the hdd segment? I cannot remember a single point where all the top drivers weren't in spitting distance from one another performance wise. 5-10MB/s and 2-4ns of latency don't really matter that much to me so I always went with Seagate because they're usually the cheapest around these parts.

 

[dir_d]

Maxtor is Seagate, All that really is left is WD, Samsung and Seagate.

 

[HalfAHertz]

There are some more smaller players like Toshiba(which kind of suck) and Hyundai(not sure if they make or rebrand hdds)

edit: wow look at the long list of defunct hdd manufacturers

 

[Easy Rhino]

this gives western digital nearly 50% market share.

 

[Frick]

edit: wow look at the long list of defunct hdd manufacturers

Hey whadday know. DEC made HDD's but sold off to Quantum. Quantum Fireballs. ^^

 

[OneCool]

good read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital


WD once had a top performing VGA

 

[btarunr]

Maxtor is Seagate, All that really is left is WD, Samsung and Seagate.

And Toshiba.

 

[Easy Rhino]

it was only 2 years ago that western digital actually surpassed seagate as the largest disk drive manufacturer. man, they have been on a role.

 

[timta2]

I bought 2 IBM/Hitachi drives, 46GB, 10 years ago that were bad drives. Cost then $200 each. I never purchased Hitachi again.

I will never be interested in Hitachi again. So for me this is a bad because I have only bought WD or Samsung drives.

I bought several Western Digital drives 10 years ago that were pieces of crap. How much sense would it make for me to avoid their product line today because of that? And it's not like it's even the same company. I'm just saying things change over that many years. I have two Hitachi 7K2000 drives that have been awesome. I've dealt with more bad WD drives than I care to remember. Personally, I think ALL brands of hard drives are much more reliable than they used to be.

 

[AsRock]

Hopefully they will make a clear difference between the Hitachi drives, WD has a good rep for now, if we find out Hitachi drives come i some of the WD drives, I'm not sure if it will be good for them

On another note, maybe PS3s and Dell computers etc etc will come with WD drives now

My PS3 and Dell laptop came with WD HDDs.

 

[Praetorian]

I always wonder what would happen with HDD if they would finally manage to increase the durability of SSD at the same or better level than of HDD. And also to decrease their price.
But keep the size differences Hmm?

 

[yogurt_21]

*waits for WD deskstar aka deathstar drives*

 

[Praetorian]

Hitachi don't have bad HDD actually. I have a 300GB one made 6 or 7 years ago and still kikin' like in day 1, dead silent even full. But it's made in Japan, not China or Taiwan...

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

The biggest benefit for us would probably be new drives using combined tech from both companies. Though I have a hard time imagining hitachi bringing much to the table tech wise.

 

[Praetorian]

The biggest benefit for us would probably be new drives using combined tech from both companies. Though I have a hard time imagining hitachi bringing much to the table tech wise.

Were the first with 2 TB if I recall right....or 3?

 

[Roph]

Heh, I have an old 80GB hitachi drive from 2003 or so inside my case, disconnected currently (no spare IDE) but it still works when I connect it up. I use it as 80GB of dormant backup. Previously I'd had it in 24/7 use for around 5-6 years.

The "deathstar" jabs at current Hitachi DeskStars are really unfounded. Try reading Wikipedia's info about it.

It's like saying all seagate 7200.x drives should be avoided due to that nasty firmware issue with the 1.5GB models.

It reminds me of England's old blanket hatred of Lancias, due to the Beta model rust problem

 

[n-ster]

I got 4 Hitachi drives die on me (laptop drives) in a few months

finally got one that works, old but barely use it (this was in ~2006/7)

 

[Batou1986]

Hitachi laptop drives are complete junk, I replace about 10+ in a months span for customers