Seagate becomes the proud new owner of Samsung’s HDD biz

Seagate has finalized its acquisition of former rival Samsung’s hard disk drive manufacturing business, officially shrinking the number of major HDD makers by one.

According to Seagate, the deal places “select elements” of Samsung under its banner. The California company touted in particular its new control over Samsung’s M8 line. The consumer electronics and storage company debuted the 1TB, 2.5-inch M8 Spinpoint this summer.

“Together, Seagate and Samsung have aligned our current and future product development efforts and roadmaps in order to accelerate time-to-market efficiency for new products and position us to better address the increasing demands for storage,” said Steve Luczo, Seagate president and CEO. “It is an exciting time in the industry with rapidly evolving opportunities in many markets including mobile computing, cloud computing, and solid state storage.”

Seagate also gained access to Samsung’s SSD and hybrid drive semiconductor line and plan to incorporate those additions in future iterations of its own devices. In turn, Samsung-branded consumer electronics will host Seagate HDDs.

Originally announced in April, the deal would have solidified Seagate’s no. 2 spot behind market leader Western Digital. Following the devastating floods across Thailand, however, Seagate is now expected to become the de facto HDD king.

Western Digital’s HDD output was severely impacted by the disaster, leading the company to admit it likely would not be able to meet consumer demand for the end of 2011. While Seagate didn’t walk away with dry feet either, the damage to its HDD shipment figures wasn’t as severe – an expected 9 million quarterly drop-off compared to its chief rival’s 34 million slide.

Western Digital announced in March it would acquire Hitachi GST. The still-pending deal has flustered Hitachi President Hiroaki Nakanishi, who admitted on Tuesday he was “very concerned” about China’s say. (via Seagate)