western digital to buy hitachi's HD business

[farlo]

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/western_digital_buying_hitachis_hard_drive_busines s_43_billion

thoughts?

[Kayin]

Still be Deathstars.

WD and I have a long love/hate relationship. I love to hate their malfunctioning drives. I once received a full case of dead drives from them.

[farlo]

i've been using WD drives exclusively when i build a pc for someone. I've been pretti lucky and have yet to recieve a doa drive in the almost 10 years ive been doing this.

[blaze15301]

wont hitachi still be around just a different division?

[AmEv]

Wow.

I'm lucky enough to have a 80GB Travelstar 0 bad sectors.

Can't say the same with my other 80GB WD. Head LITERALLY FUSED itself to the platter.

[slaveofconvention]

I've never been a fan of WD drives - although I admit for no specific reason. As for Hitachi, I had a pair of the notorious IBM Deskstar 60GB IDEs which failed time and time again - one was returned twice, the other three times before I stopped returning them (they didn't stop failing, I just got sick of the RMA process).

My current weapon of choice - samsungs - never had a problem yet so until I do, they're getting my hard-earned....

[x88x]

Nooo! WD! Don't suck again...please! You just convinced me that you were finally good! :(

Well...I suppose this doesn't necessarily mean that anything major will be changing, but...I can't help but think of when Seagate bought Maxtor. Seagate used to be the only HDD manufacturer I trusted, with good reason. Then they bought Maxtor and most (if not all) of their consumer drives slowly spiraled down, down, down...to Maxtor levels. :(

On the flip side of that, I used to absolutely loath WD drives...again, with good reason. I worked with a lot of drives from the 2-6GB generation while volunteering as a computer tech at a local nonprofit in high school. Out of all the, I'm gonna say hundreds, of drives that I encountered there, the WD's were just slightly more reliable than the DeathStars...whereas the Seagates were shining examples of reliability. Since then, many things have changed. Now, I steer clear of Seagate (for reasons mentioned above), and WD is one of my first choices for drives, because they have proven that they have improved their drives immensely, to the point where they have one of the best track records I know of. BTW, like slave, Samsung is my first choice. ;)

So...WD...PLEASE, OH PLEASE do not follow in Seagate's footsteps! You make some good stuff now! Don't just dump your consumer manufacturing on Hitachi, like Seagate did with Maxtor. Make Hitachi good, don't let Hitachi make you bad again.

...fingers crossed...

[crenn]

I have 3 2TBs Seagate LPs, 2 have been RMAed for clicking (the new drives are working fine) and the other is going to fail slowly, but I can't RMA it yet. The nice thing about the Seagate drives I've had, is I've never ever lost data on a seagate drive due to it failing.

I also have a 2TB WD Green HDD which is running fine. The only complaint isn't related to the HDD, but to the enclosure it's in. I've also had several Samsung laptop HDDs suddenly biting the bullet. We also have 4x 2TB Hitachi drives, although they run hot, they're running fine after almost a full year of being nearly constantly on.

[SXRguyinMA]

I've got a dead 500GB seagate on my desk, has been sitting here and will continue to sit until I can save up to have a company get my stuff off. Drive was less than a year old too, so it's been WD for me since, and not a single issue

[OvRiDe]

I trusted WD Caviar drives for a long time, at least until they hit the 40GB mark. When the 40GB drives came out we had a really rough time. From that point on I quit with WD and ventured back to Seagate which has not let me down. But that said.. I have 2 WD Black 500GB 6GB/sec drives that were just delivered waiting for me at home. So we will just have to wait and see how that works out.

[dr.walrus]

Having had half a dozen WDs with perfect reliability, preceded by 3 or 4 Seagates that died horribly, my take on this is just sheer probability.

[mDust]

thoughts?
4.5 billion dollars is a lot of money. That's about all I thought. As SSDs get larger and cheaper, HDDs are going to eventually go the way of the floppies, dodo and parachute pants. [Allegedly] bad HD makers will get a chance to change their reputation again when they all start making SSDs as SSDs are completely separate tech and bad practices [probably] won't carry over.

wont hitachi still be around just a different division?
The parent company will be around but they're out of the HDD market.

[AmEv]

To the point where we can ACTUALLY AFFORD that 1GB SSD on the 'Egg.

I like that.

[TheGreatSatan]

Still be Deathstars.

WD and I have a long love/hate relationship. I love to hate their malfunctioning drives. I once received a full case of dead drives from them.

I don't get the old predjudice. Yes, they had a sucky point. So did Seagates back when the 7200.10's were out. Hitachi drives are great these days

[Konrad]

Does this mean WD can capitalize on Hitachi's technology patents? Will future WD drives have best-of-both-worlds capabilities?

Or will WD continue to operate Hitachi somewhat "as is", just using the brand to hit markets they haven't yet penetrated deeply?

I can't see them entirely abolishing Hitachi HDD ... this would be a very costly way for them to eliminate a competitor.