Two of the major players in the digital storage industry joined forces on Monday as Western Digital (WD) acquired Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) for $3.5 billion in cash, and an additional 25 million stock shares worth $750 million.
The acquisition makes WD the dominant company in the global HDD & SSD markets with a 49% share of shipments, nearly double that of the now #2 supplier, Seagate.
“This brings together two industry leaders with consistent track records of strong execution and industry outperformance,” said Steve Milligan, Hitachi GST president and CEO, in the press release announcing the deal. “Together we can provide customers worldwide with the industry’s most compelling and diverse set of products and services, from innovative personal storage to solid state drives for the enterprise.”
“We believe this step will result in several key benefits-enhanced R&D capabilities, innovation and expansion of a rich product portfolio, comprehensive market coverage and scale that will enhance our cost structure and ability to compete in a dynamic marketplace,” added John Coyne, president and CEO of WD. “The skills and contributions of both workforces were key considerations in assessing this compelling opportunity.”
The deal actually serves to give WD more of a boost in the enterprise storage market than with consumer products, where margins are much lower on sales. Before the acquisition, WD’s share of the enterprise market was a mere 1%, a stark contrast to Hitachi’s 27% share.
Now that the industry only has 3 remaining key players (Seagate, Toshiba and Samsung), consumers are finding themselves having to either deal with the acquisition or overcome long-standing grudges. HDD and SSD buyers are quite loyal to their favorite brand with a special loathing for the competition, as comments on Tom’s Hardware following the announcement reveal.
Personally, I find it disappointing that an industry with such little competition now has even less, but I do believe that WD made a smart move that will largely benefit the company’s operations. Hopefully, pricing and quality of SSD and HDD’s will both remain competitive despite the deal.
23 Comments on Western Digital acquires Hitachi, will dominate HDD market
If Hitachi can raise WD"s manufacturing standards, wonderful.
If WD brings Hitachi drives down to WD standards then I'll be looking
for a SSD! I've found WD drives to be about as reliable as a Politician's
Promise the day after the Election.
If WD brings Hitachi drives down to WD standards then I'll be looking
for a SSD! I've found WD drives to be about as reliable as a Politician's
Promise the day after the Election.
I agree with olddancer. I currently have six Hitachi drives (two in RAID 1 and four in RAID 0+1) that have been excellent in performance and reliability. It would be a shame if the quality dropped down to that of WD drives that I have used in the past.
I got a WD TV HD media player a few months back, Plays anything I throw at it, The kids(teenagers) use it every day, nice product!!!
Hitachi -> Faster HDD's ...
WD -> Die early HDD's ...
Hitach+WD -> Die early Faster HDD's
WD -> Die early HDD's ...
Hitach+WD -> Die early Faster HDD's
Also see this thread: http://club.myce.com/f138/western-di...7/#post2578915
Quote:
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Originally Posted by debro
Hitachi -> Faster HDD's ...
WD -> Die early HDD's ... Hitach+WD -> Die early Faster HDD's |
And this is based on????
Quote:
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Originally Posted by RichMan
I agree with olddancer. I currently have six Hitachi drives (two in RAID 1 and four in RAID 0+1) that have been excellent in performance and reliability. It would be a shame if the quality dropped down to that of WD drives that I have used in the past.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by olddancer
If Hitachi can raise WD"s manufacturing standards, wonderful.
If WD brings Hitachi drives down to WD standards then I'll be looking for a SSD! I've found WD drives to be about as reliable as a Politician's Promise the day after the Election. |
Seemed to me my family and myself had problems with WD drives all the time. I always use Seagate Barracuda now. Cant say I've ever sen a Hitachi drive in a computer shop.
Less competition is always bad for the consumer, for that reason alone, I'm bummed on this acquisition.
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Originally Posted by Blu-rayFreak
Less competition is always bad for the consumer, for that reason alone, I'm bummed on this acquisition.
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Regarding WD
I've had no luck with them, and now only use Samsung.
Um, what about Seagate ? They bought Maxtor a few years ago, I thought this put them in a dominant position ?
coolcolors, WD have had a bad rap from alot of sources over the years. My company's supplier steers clear of them from their integration solutions due to lack of reliability. These guys know their stuff, the industry they and deal with very high volume of system integrations per year.
Alas,I experienced problems with WD drives myself and never went back.
I have always preferred Seagate myself, specially in the Enterprise class high end drives. My company integrates 1000's of these drives into our products every year with low failure rates.
Unfortunately Seagate had that firmware / drive-brick debacle a couple of years ago on some consumer class models and that sure tainted their reputation.
coolcolors, WD have had a bad rap from alot of sources over the years. My company's supplier steers clear of them from their integration solutions due to lack of reliability. These guys know their stuff, the industry they and deal with very high volume of system integrations per year.
Alas,I experienced problems with WD drives myself and never went back.
I have always preferred Seagate myself, specially in the Enterprise class high end drives. My company integrates 1000's of these drives into our products every year with low failure rates.
Unfortunately Seagate had that firmware / drive-brick debacle a couple of years ago on some consumer class models and that sure tainted their reputation.
I have a mixture of a 1TB Hitachi and 2 Hitachi 2TB's hdd's and
2 Western Digital 1TB hdd's in my system right now and in the
2 external enclosures I have a 1TB Hitachi and a 500GB Western
Digital hdd's and the Hitachi drives are always a little faster in all
the benchmarks over the WD drives.
As for reliability they are all on par with each other as I've not.......
so far experienced any failures out of any of them not anything like
I did out of the Seagate drives I've tried to use.
I had a brand new 1TB Seagate die out in just a very, very short while
and the first replacement of it lased only a few days and its replacement
only lasted a few minutes out of the box before going belly up and having
me throw it in the trash can and not even trying to get it replaced again
and I swore completely off of every buying another Seagate hdd again.
Some of you will say it was just a recent thing for all of the bad Seagate
hdd's but I had bad experiences with Seagate hdd's long before the most
recent firmware debacle. I even had problems with Seagate hdd's as far
back as 2000 and then with this last bad firmware debacle that was what
a couple of years ago that is what really done me in on ever buying anything
with the Seagate name on it again.
2 Western Digital 1TB hdd's in my system right now and in the
2 external enclosures I have a 1TB Hitachi and a 500GB Western
Digital hdd's and the Hitachi drives are always a little faster in all
the benchmarks over the WD drives.
As for reliability they are all on par with each other as I've not.......
so far experienced any failures out of any of them not anything like
I did out of the Seagate drives I've tried to use.
I had a brand new 1TB Seagate die out in just a very, very short while
and the first replacement of it lased only a few days and its replacement
only lasted a few minutes out of the box before going belly up and having
me throw it in the trash can and not even trying to get it replaced again
and I swore completely off of every buying another Seagate hdd again.
Some of you will say it was just a recent thing for all of the bad Seagate
hdd's but I had bad experiences with Seagate hdd's long before the most
recent firmware debacle. I even had problems with Seagate hdd's as far
back as 2000 and then with this last bad firmware debacle that was what
a couple of years ago that is what really done me in on ever buying anything
with the Seagate name on it again.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by coolcolors
And this is based on????
|
I've wiped, smashed & thrown out about 3x hitachi 2.5" HDDs which were running, up until the point I repeatedly bashed them with a hammer .....
Of course,, i recognise that there are 6 billion people in the world, making myself statistically insignificant, and certainly the discarded HDD's statistically insignificant ....
Just pointing out that my WD HDD's have all been relatively slow and the least reliable of any HDD's I've bought .. with the exception of seagate .. but I haven't bought seagate in last few years ... except a recent 2TB Seagate that was 2 for $180 about 6 months ago.
So I'm open to re-evaluation ....
Quote:
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Originally Posted by getit29
I had a brand new 1TB Seagate die out in just a very, very short while
and the first replacement of it lased only a few days and its replacement only lasted a few minutes out of the box before going belly up and having me throw it in the trash can and not even trying to get it replaced again and I swore completely off of every buying another Seagate hdd again. Some of you will say it was just a recent thing for all of the bad Seagate hdd's but I had bad experiences with Seagate hdd's long before the most recent firmware debacle. I even had problems with Seagate hdd's as far back as 2000 and then with this last bad firmware debacle that was what a couple of years ago that is what really done me in on ever buying anything with the Seagate name on it again. |
1997 -> First year of university ... when I was *really* poor ... I bought 1x seagate HDD with my few spare pennies (actually it was my food budget) ... had to be replaced twice ... 1st one .. broke after 30mins (during windows install .. ffs) .... next one ... broke atfter 1 day use ... the replacement broke after 2 weeks ... then I got a refund ...
Ok, fine, be a skeptic ... sometimes manufacturers have a bad batch ... it's just unlucky ... right
1998 -> Different series of Seagate HDD's ... a friend had the same as above, gave up, bought WD - not sure what happened with his WD .. probably also broke down ...
1999 ... My Maxtor raid 0 array was slowng down for no apparent reason, and raid monitorig program was complaining it had issues ... I ran down to the shops, bought a shiny new WD HDD, copied all my important documents to the new WD ... redefined/reformatted the raid array, reinstalled windows/etc and was 20% through the process of putting my doc's back on the raid array .. the WD HDD broke down ... FSS.
2001 ... a friends went through the same problem .. shiny new pair of seagate HDD's in raid .. and called me in when it broke after a few days .... FFS .... (this is when I gave up on Raid 0)
One of the HDD's was fubar ... was replaced ... the other HDD broke down after 2 weeks ... shop was out of seagates ... waited 3 weeks, and the "replacement" HDD was a new series ... FFS .. he demanded full refund for both drives, and bought something else.
2004 .... my parents got their new PC .. brand spanking new shiny seagate HDD .... after 3 months .... it started to *slooooow dooooowwwwn* for no apparent reason .... wtf? after another 2 months .. broke down .. still in warranty .. FFS - RMA'd the drive, bought them a new (samsung) HDD and palmed the RMA'd drive off to someone else that thought I was doing them a favour ... Gee I'm a bastard ...
My last drive purchase was a 1tb caviar black drive for about $100-- about 2 months after I bought it the price dropped about $20 and is probably about only $10 less now due to supply/demand ratios.
I don't see how WD merging with HItachi gets their prices lower and/or innovation in a better place. Will a stronger WD/Hitachi force Seagate to undercut them on prices?
Doubtful. What this will probably motivate is smaller players samsung and toshiba into smaller market shares and force them to compete on price where they were given a pass before as there were enough similarly priced product. What we're looking for is the competition and market conditions when we get to 4tb internal hard drives for desktops and 1-2tb notebook hard drives. Would be a shame if non-competition pushes the 4+tb hard drives into the less affordable range for a much longer time (12+ months, similar to blue ray burners).
What will the prices and/or quality be?
I don't see how WD merging with HItachi gets their prices lower and/or innovation in a better place. Will a stronger WD/Hitachi force Seagate to undercut them on prices?
Doubtful. What this will probably motivate is smaller players samsung and toshiba into smaller market shares and force them to compete on price where they were given a pass before as there were enough similarly priced product. What we're looking for is the competition and market conditions when we get to 4tb internal hard drives for desktops and 1-2tb notebook hard drives. Would be a shame if non-competition pushes the 4+tb hard drives into the less affordable range for a much longer time (12+ months, similar to blue ray burners).
What will the prices and/or quality be?
Quote:
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Originally Posted by debro
Just pointing out that my WD HDD's have all been relatively slow and the least reliable of any HDD's I've bought .. with the exception of seagate .. but I haven't bought seagate in last few years ... except a recent 2TB Seagate that was 2 for $180 about 6 months ago.
So I'm open to re-evaluation .... |
Quote:
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Originally Posted by coolcolors
This is more like comparing apples to oranges again without any specifications to base off or to test with. I used WD HDD IDE since they came out and only one lasted 7 years before going out and the rest I just outgrew their capacity and the switch to Sata. Relatively slow doesn't say much when there nothing to compare with the same specs to test with. Also we don't know how your hardware setup was and how you used the HDD doesn't give a full picture of the usage of the HDD to determine it MTBF of lifespan runtime. As anything how you treat your hardware or amount of dust bunnies that grow inside your case will shorten the lifespan of any hardware.
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Quite frankly, I can't remember the model no# of most of my currently operating HDD's ... let alone the model no#, model revision and firmware revisions of anything 10years ago.
And yes .. as mentioned above .. statistically insignificant
But if you want accurate figures and statistics for model numbers ... perhaps you can ask the marketting department of the relevant manufacturer for their figures on breakdowns, and their level of support for warranties
Of course .. for brand new HDD's, short of installing them into a PC, beginning a slipstreamed installation of an OS, and then hauling the PC & UPS off a cliff .... unacceptable. And then having replacements die similarly in exceptionally short lifetimes .. unacceptable.
All standard desktop machines - light use ...
.. no thrashing in a server database environment or HDD destructive testing environments ...
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by debro
But if you want accurate figures and statistics for model numbers ... perhaps you can ask the marketting department of the relevant manufacturer for their figures on breakdowns, and their level of support for warranties |
Quote:
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Originally Posted by debro
Of course .. for brand new HDD's, short of installing them into a PC, beginning a slipstreamed installation of an OS, and then hauling the PC & UPS off a cliff .... unacceptable. And then having replacements die similarly in exceptionally short lifetimes .. unacceptable.
|
Quote:
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Originally Posted by debro
Hitachi -> Faster HDD's ...
WD -> Die early HDD's ... Hitach+WD -> Die early Faster HDD's |
Curiously, despite having a bunch of WD drives and a single Hitachi, it's the Hitachi which is looking to be on the verge of failure (1TB 7200) ...
Quote:
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Originally Posted by coolcolors
Based on????
|
What matters to me is my experience. It doesn't matter to me if other people think that WD drives are the best. To each their own. However, I've had better luck with other brands. I would need to see some very impressive reviews before I try and brand that has let me down in the past.
In the late 90's or so my work used mostly WD drives in the systems that we shipped. The failure rate was quite high. If I remember correctly, these drives were in the 8GB range (some probably a little larger).
Quote:
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Originally Posted by RichMan
What matters to me is my experience.
|
with any brand of drive.
I know I rag a lot on Seagate drives but that is based just from my own bad experience with them
in the past.
As with anything electrical or mechanical there are going to be good ones and bad ones that come
from the factory that is just the way it is just to bad there is nothing anyone can do about it.
I just wish there was a lemon law on hdd's so after having to have it replaced so many times the
company would have to refund your money for it.
Yes it sucks to loose Hitachi to WD even though I'm a WD fan. Less competition is always bad for consumers. I have owned Maxtor (before seagate owned them). Maxtor built solid drives back in the day, WD, Seagate, Samsung and Hitachi drives. I have had two WD drives fail, two Seagate drives fail and one Hitachi drive fail. WD has great product support and both times the RMA process was painless. I received new replacement drives in less than three working days in both cases. IMO WD has the best support. Seagate support sucks balls. I took near forever to receive replacement drives and both replacements we junk from the get go. The Hitachi drive that failed was a 2.5 inch drive that was many years old and was well out of warranty. I'll stick with WD because they support their products better IMO.
As others have said buy the brand of drives that you have had good luck with.
Bill
As others have said buy the brand of drives that you have had good luck with.
Bill
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