TOKYO--Hitachi Ltd. will sell its wholly owned hard disk drive business
to U.S. company Western Digital Corp. for around $4 billion, the Nikkei reported Monday.

Bad news .

Or good news, depending on which side

I believe this will reduce competition and quality of the drives, which should be good for DR market, but not for a consumer.

_________________
www.datarecoveryne.com

Maybe they will do as Seagate when they took over Maxtor. Keep the name of the HDD but then change the way it is manufactured and apply the technology to the drive that is WD on this one.

If this is the case then we will see more and more problems in this drive series and will have more issues of the same problems that we do now in WD drives.

Who knows but Seagate did this to Maxtor and we had a lot of Seagate issues in Maxtor drives after this one.

_________________
Iorana Haraharaini

We have Seagate issues on actual Maxtors as they are, after all, Seagates (7200.1x)
When Quantum was incorporated by Maxtor we had same platform with different commercial names and some modifications, ST and STM (actual Seagate and Maxtor) is the same thing...
Nevertheless, Quantum AS and Maxtor "equivalents" like MX740 were very good drives with very good tech and quality inside - a nightmare for physical repair but this is another story.
I am curious to see if there still will be Hitachi as we used to know or only WDs based on WD cheap technology... Industry and commerce are strange

If Hitachi has a better HDA, then why wouldn't WD make use of the technology to improve their own product line, especially in their enterprise class drives?

As for reduced competition, at face value that sounds bad, but AISI it is the commodity pricing that is driving down the quality of hard drives. I wouldn't mind paying twice the price for a HD if the quality were to improve to the level that it was 10 years ago.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

It just shows that you are in minority
Anyway there are two straight forward solutions for you
1. RAID1 - exactly twice the price
2. Online backup

_________________
SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

also TOSHIBA aquired FUJITSU for HDDs ... but doesen't look like SEAGATE with MAXTOR.

So ithink we have only to wait and see what will happen

_________________
Data Recovery pro in Italy
www.ultrarecovery.com

If WD rebrands Hitachi I may be able to afford a brand new Lamborghini this year.

_________________
Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

I have seen some acres of land... Slurp !!

1. RAID1 - exactly twice the price

The HD manufacturers, particularly Seagate and WD, will tell you that their consumer grade drives are not RAID-able. The reason appears to be that ERC and TLER have been crippled in the firmware, and are only available in the enterprise class models. In any case, reliability issues make RAIDs unworkable, even when using enterprise class drives.

See this VERY LONG thread at Seagate's forums:
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda- ... td-p/26989

2. Online backup[/quote]

ROTFLMAO!

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

It's a very clever, strategic move. WD will have a royalty-free, perpetual license under HGST non-patent intellectual property and also a 5 year minimum license on its patented intellectual property.

WD will be able to sell into Hitachi Data Storage Systems (as long as the deal is competitive with those of other suppliers)Of course WD will have HGST disti infrastructure in place to help.

Hitachi will not be able to manufacture a competitive Hitachi branded drive for at least 10 years

and the best bit for the lucky few!
_________________________-
Messrs. Coyne, Milligan and Leyden will be paid annual base salaries of $1,000,000, $800,000 and $700,000, respectively, effective as of March 7, 2011 in the case of Mr. Coyne and effective as of the date of the Closing in the case of Messrs. Milligan and Leyden.

_________________
All went well until I plugged the drive in.