Western Digital buying Hitachi GST

The hard drive business is a mature business and has been in consolidation mode for awhile. Hitachi bought IBM's hard drive business and consolidated with their own to form Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. Now it will be consolidated into Western Digital.

It makes some sense as I believe Western Digital had a better PC business and Hitachi GST had a better enterprise business.

Not likely a benefit to consumers but I am guessing not a big negative either.

Between all my DVRs, Computers, and external Storage units I have about 22 hard drives in my house. Pretty evenly split between Western Digital, Hitachi, and Seagate.

Thanks,

Hard drives are becoming so cheap it's hard to make any money on them without massive volume, so consolidation makes sense. Plus the consume space is most likely going to transition to SSD in the next 5 years or so anyway, so HDDs will mostly be used for servers and other enterprise applications anyway.

Dan

Seagate just bough Samsung's Hard Drive division.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/19/samsung-sells-hdd-division-to-seagate-for-1-375-billion/

Is it just Western Digital and Seagate now? I think everything under other names is just a relabeled model from Seagate or Western Digital now.

dswallow said:

Seagate just bough Samsung's Hard Drive division.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/19/samsung-sells-hdd-division-to-seagate-for-1-375-billion/

Is it just Western Digital and Seagate now? I think everything under other names is just a relabeled model from Seagate or Western Digital now.

Click to expand...

I believe Toshiba still makes some drives, but only notebook ones.

dswallow said:

Seagate just bough Samsung's Hard Drive division.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/19/samsung-sells-hdd-division-to-seagate-for-1-375-billion/

Is it just Western Digital and Seagate now? I think everything under other names is just a relabeled model from Seagate or Western Digital now.

Click to expand...

And last I knew Maxtor made Seagate... By the way IMHO Seagate makes the worst hard drives on the market. I have bought 2, 1 (750GB) crashed in 3 weeks the other took 5 weeks, it is in a 4x1GB NAS RAID setup. I used to own a computer repair shop and 8 out of 10 (NOT exaggerating) dead drives that came in were Seagate... I will never buy another drive that WD didn't make. I very rarely see dead ones (but yes, I am aware it happens).

Anyway....back to consolidation talk

1gr8ftoy said:

And last I knew Maxtor made Seagate... By the way IMHO Seagate makes the worst hard drives on the market. I have bought 2, 1 (750GB) crashed in 3 weeks the other took 5 weeks, it is in a 4x1GB NAS RAID setup. I used to own a computer repair shop and 8 out of 10 (NOT exaggerating) dead drives that came in were Seagate... I will never buy another drive that WD didn't make. I very rarely see dead ones (but yes, I am aware it happens).

Anyway....back to consolidation talk

Click to expand...

Maxtor was bought by Seagate years ago.

We are going from 4 providers (Hitachi, Seagate, Samsung, & Western Digital) of 3.5 inch consumer hard drives too 2 providers (Seagate & Western Digital) in a matter of a few months. This is not a good thing for anyone needing a 3.5 inch consumer hard drives. Prices will likely go up somewhat in the near future.

From what I can tell all the drives are made in china (at least all the ones I have bought recently were (I have bought 1 Hitachi, 1 Seagate, & 1 Western Digital since January, all made in China).

Thanks,

Seagate was bought by Maxtor years ago.

Click to expand...

Isn't it really the other way around?

Seagate bought Maxtor. Or Maxtor was bought by Seagate.

dwit said:

Isn't it really the other way around?

Seagate bought Maxtor. Or Maxtor was bought by Seagate.

Click to expand...

Yes brain fa** Sorry - I fixed the post.

atmuscarella said:

Between all my DVRs, Computers, and external Storage units I have about 22 hard drives in my house. Pretty evenly split between Western Digital, Hitachi, and Seagate.

Click to expand...

I have 40, but who's counting?

That's spinning disks, BTW. I have a ton of old / spare / backup drives laying around.

Maxtor bought Quantum and then Maxtor was bought by Seagate who also just purchased Samsung's hard drive business. With Hitachi drives being acquired by Western Digital, there are basically only two major players left in the consumer hard drive business.

FWIW, Seagate used to make the best drives as well as the quietest. Their product line went downhill after they acquired Maxtor so I'm guessing they just rebadged the Maxtor models rather than continue to market their own.

mr.unnatural said:

Maxtor bought Quantum and then Maxtor was bought by Seagate who also just purchased Samsung's hard drive business. With Hitachi drives being acquired by Western Digital, there are basically only two major players left in the consumer hard drive business.

FWIW, Seagate used to make the best drives as well as the quietest. Their product line went downhill after they acquired Maxtor so I'm guessing they just rebadged the Maxtor models rather than continue to market their own.

Click to expand...

Seagate's path toward suckitude started, it seems to me, when they acquired Connor, a lot of which got re-badged 'til they worked through the old stock.

That said, I have to admit that I have a pair of ST3160815A (box says ST3160023A-RK) I got in December of 2007 on sale at Best Buy that have worked just fine, except that the ultra-finicky Series 1 will only accept one of them at a time, although it's perfectly happy with one of them and something else like a WD or Maxtor.

1gr8ftoy said:

And last I knew Maxtor made Seagate... By the way IMHO Seagate makes the worst hard drives on the market. I have bought 2, 1 (750GB) crashed in 3 weeks the other took 5 weeks, it is in a 4x1GB NAS RAID setup. I used to own a computer repair shop and 8 out of 10 (NOT exaggerating) dead drives that came in were Seagate... I will never buy another drive that WD didn't make. I very rarely see dead ones (but yes, I am aware it happens).

Anyway....back to consolidation talk

Click to expand...

I must be getting all of the bad WD drives you aren't . I had one go dead two weeks after purchasing it. I had one in a brand new TiVo Premiere XL take a dump on me after five months. I have had issues with a few others. I have only had one Seagate go bad on me in the several years I have been using Seagate. I guess it's just luck of the draw.

I guess I have reasonable good luch with the drives I happen to get.

Since the mid 2000s, I have bought a couple Samsung 80GB from the local computer store (They are the running drives for my PCs I built in that era.)

Between then and last year, I always got WD drives, the only hardware failure being a TiVo drive.

Last year, the coupe new computers we bough have Seagate drives, and I got a Seagate Freeagent Go USB drive, all with no issues yet.