WD is buying Hitachi GST (Hard Drive Business)

[andyb]

I didnt see this coming.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/07 ... sachi_gst/


Andy

[victorhortalives]

Good for WD.
Maybe WD can bring some cool'n'quiet to Hitachi drives as, apart from noise & temps, Hitachi drives are pretty good (esp for RAID).

[Metaluna]

The problem is that Hitachi's RAID-friendliness may not survive the transition. From the article it looks like WD is most interested in Hitachi's Enterprise-class products (especially SSD's). From a business perspective their consumer drives are a mostly redundant product line, so not much incentive to keep them around. Given WD's history, they might even go out of their way to disable the RAID-friendly firmware behavior.

[fumino]

not sure if i like this...

the added capacity should help drive prices down even lower, and hitachis were generally priced much better than WDs. in therms of the raid friendliness i would hope that wd changes their catalog so that for 3.5" drives they'd have..

• a basic green drive- 5k+ without fancy firmware
  and advanced green drive - 5k+ with fancy power savings that make it garbage for raid, but have aggressive power savings
  a basic 7k+rpm drive - just a basic model again - balance between raid friendly or green... i'd say let that be decided by something like aam settings. perf mode or green mode.
  a 7k+ rpm drive for performance (wd black) - probably raid friendly
  a 7k+ enterprise/24/7 usage drive - wd/av with features and interface options like hitachi enterprise drives. will have to be raid friendly
  10k &15k performance drives for enterprise
  maybe a hybrid drive @ 10k rpm. like a raptor crossed with a momentus xt

when you look at it like that, wd wants hitachi for two things: the enterprise market, and a huge boost in capacity. they'll be able to drop their prices and dominate seagate.