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IBM Bails Out of the Hard Drive Market

Posted by timothy on from the spinning-down dept.

DJ STORM writes: "IBM has decided to exit the hard drive market citing the market has become too competitive.They plan to sell 70% of the their HD business to Hitachi. The new company name is unknown. One has to wonder if this has anything to do with IBM's troubled Deskstar GXP series." IBM will still have part ownership of the resulting venture, but it sounds like no more Deskstars. Update: 04/17 16:33 GMT by T : You may also find interesting some older posts about IBM's work on increasing hard drive storage (1, 2, 3); hopefully, the new company will continue that R&D effort.

4 of 344 comments (clear)

  1. manufacture vs. research by buzban · · Score: 5, Interesting
    what i don't think this article talks much about is whether or not IBM will continue to conduct the voluminous research it has traditionally done relative to data storage. IBM has patents on tons (a technical term) of HDD and related technologies; the company has a hand in many such products, even when their name isn't on the label.

    personally, i hope they keep their labs working on the research end of data storage, because i'm not sure that there's anyone else to pick up the slack. if there isn't, the pace of "bigger capacity, faster, smaller footprint, more, more, more ..." just might slow down a little.

  2. Re:They were the real competitors by garcia · · Score: 4, Interesting

    they might have come up w/the cool technology but they were selling it at rates that just could not compete w/the other vendors.

    It was like their PC lines. They were always $500 - $1000 more than anyone else. Who the hell would want to pay that?

    I have an IBM Microdrive and I love it. But I wouldn't want to pay extra money for a regular HD when I could get something comparable for a shitload less.

  3. Holographic drives by commonchaos · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I really hope that this means they will be coming out with a holographic drive soon, I went to a science fair back in '99 (if memory serves) at the IBM Almaden Research Center. They demonstrated a table sized holographic drive to us - they played a IBM commercial off of it... I've been waiting ever since.

  4. Response to the CBDTPA? by Silverhammer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Could this also be a preemptive response to the CBDTPA? IBM has indeed driven much of the innovation in hard drive technology, so maybe they figure they should get out now while the gettin' is good.