WD's Purchase of Hitachi HDD Business Approved by EU Regulators

[btarunr]

Western Digital (WD), secured an approval (conditional), from the European Union regulator in-charge of competition that enables it to go ahead and purchase Hitachi's hard disk drive business. WD is purchasing Hitachi's HDD assets for US $4.3 billion. "The proposed divestiture will ensure that competition in the industry is fully restored before the merger is implemented," EU Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said in a statement. What makes the EU approval conditional is the fact that WD had to first agree to sell several of its production operations, which it did, to Toshiba, early this month.



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[m1dg3t]

Only goodness can come out of this

 

[trickson]

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

 

[repman244]

WHY 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.

 

[arnoo1]

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

 

[Psychoholic]

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..

 

[hhumas]

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

 

[eidairaman1]

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

 

[xaira]

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

 

[Deleted member 3]

Only 2 left, that's quite bad.

 

[eidairaman1]

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

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

 

[swreynolds]

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.

 

[Bambooz]

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))