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Western Digital's Hitachi Storage Takeover Approved With Restrictions
angry tapir writes "Western Digital's plan to buy Hitachi Global Storage has run into U.S. FTC resistance: The U.S. FTC will require Western Digital to sell off assets used to manufacture desktop hard drives to a competitor as a condition of its U.S.$4.5 billion acquisition of rival Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, the agency has announced."
It looks like Toshiba is the competitor receiving the manufacturing assets.
More from the FTC: "Under the proposed settlement order, Toshiba will receive all of the productive assets needed to replicate Hitachi Global Storage Technologies' position in the desktop hard disk drive market. In addition, the settlement order requires Western Digital to provide Toshiba with access to its employees involved in research and development and the production of desktop hard disk drives, and also requires Western Digital to license all intellectual property needed to make and supply desktop hard disk drives to Toshiba. The settlement order also requires Western Digital to be available to supply Toshiba with certain components Toshiba will need to run the desktop hard disk drive business it acquires, and to contract manufacture hard disk drives for Toshiba until Toshiba is able to manufacture them on its own. The FTC also has appointed a monitor to oversee the sale of the assets to Toshiba and to keep the Commission informed about the status of the required divestiture."
So Western Digital can buy Hitachi... but give everything that might possibly have been a competitive advantage away to Toshiba at a low cost?
Worst drives I've ever owned.
How exactly is it supposed to get better for consumers if the government forces companies to give everything they have to a competitor in order to get permission to buy another company?
Companies will stop spending on R&D because they will need to give all their research away for free if they want to buy another company.
This will leave no good desk top hard drives being made. WD was the last decent brand.
Hitachi (formerly IBM) branded drives were the most reliable out of them all. And unlike Hitachi, Western Digital crippled their SATA drives with TLER settings to prevent proper RAID operation. The drives would drop out after 30 days of continuous use in some instances. So, they forced users to use either the Enterprise or RAID edition drives. It pisses me off that it's not Hitachi buying out WD.
And yes, WD MyBook drives are absolute shit too. Don't use them for backups. They last about year or so and that's it.
Life is not for the lazy.
Does this mean no more amusing flash videos to announce new technological breakthroughs?! Okay, so it didn't happen all that often, but I still can't forget Hitachi's "Get Perpendicular" video from 2005 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb_PyKuI7II. Like others, I'm surprised they aren't the ones consuming WD.
I currently own several WD hard drives and never had any major problems out of them. I'm at the point now i actually refuse to buy anything else. Most of what I own are Ide drives have a 250 a 200 a couple of 120s and an 80 or two most are in computers that get used at various different times. and in my new computer i have a 250 for my operating system and a 640 for everything else both are sata and have been running fine for over a year with no problems. As a side note the 200 and the 250 are in the same computer and at one point ran for 2 years straight without being powered down except for updates and if the power went out and still run great now.
Ahh, that makes sense now. I was wondering what Western Digital would be without its disk manufacturing capability. The next Creative Labs, I suppose.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Western Deathstar!
that their samsung hdd acquisition closed first.. otherwise they would've been the ones creating a global duopoly instead of wdc....
Those drives must have a curse on them. Wasn't Hitachi the recipient of IBM's failed Storage Division, whose infamous DeskStar drives were prone to failure after about a year of usage?
Considering that most Toshiba hardware sucks (yeah, I'm looking at the entire Satellite line of laptops); I'll stay away from these like the plague. , thanks.
Regards,
MBC1977,
Seriously. I read that article and I didn't see any clear definition. Is it anything larger than a 2.5" laptop drive? Any 3.5" drive having certain characteristics? Maybe less than 10K rpm? Is a 3.5" 7200rpm drive with an "enterprise" sticker on it a server drive or a desktop drive?
This is really too funny from a historical standpoint. At one time, WD bought drives from IBM and put their label on them until they could manufacture the equivalent type drives (IBM was cutting edge at the time) for themselves. Then IBM hit the problem with sticking heads on their Deskstar series, their reputation went down the tube, and they sold their drive business to Hitachi. Now WD is buying part of Hitachi's drive business, and will put their label on them. Of course, it's not quite as funny as the MiniScribe debacle.
After a string of bad WD drives I switched to Hitachi and never looked back.
This sucks.
Wow, bring on the crazy conspiracy theories. LTER=0 is what you want for a single-drive desktop configuration; LTER=7 is a good value for a RAID. This isn't them "cripping" the drive. It's setting a sensible default for the drive's intended market. If you want to use the drive in a different way, JUST CHANGE THE SETTING.
With everyone talking about raids and stuff....How do I find "raid" harddrives on newegg?
I stopped buying WD's like 15 years ago cause they tended to last about a year and then shit on themselves, and every one that has come my way since then has been easily classified as loud and slow, ie: I have some 40 and 80 gigs that only support ata 66 and 100 while being loud enough to drown out my video card fan around here somewhere...
Hitachi's on the other hand I have never had a problem with, heck I have a 540 meg laptop drive in my 386 lappy that runs as quiet as the day it was new (it came with my pentium laptop), and while I cant really say anything spectacular about them, I never had a problem with them ... until now
(based on my 20 years of hard disk buying, I hear WD doesnt suck as bad now, but I am not the type to pay to get punched in the balls multiple times)
Yep!! I've always hate doing hard drive RMAs. Honestly, it's to the point where the manufacturers should just accept them with a "no questions asked" policy for exchange during the length of their warranty period. Most of the people who lack the knowledge to adequately determine if a given drive is bad aren't capable of physically removing it from a computer and doing the RMA on it anyway.
I don't know about some of them, but my recent experiences with Seagate RMAs tells me it's pretty much a "one shot" exchange policy anyway. EG. If your drive has a "5 year warranty" and it goes bad in 6 months? As soon as you do the RMA, your replacement is specially branded as a replacement product and only carries something like a 90 day warranty. The warranty length only tells you how long you get to do ONE replacement for free.
"I stopped buying WD's like 15 years ago cause they tended to last about a year and then shit on themselves" - by Osgeld (1900440) on Tuesday March 06, @07:58PM (#39269047)
Oh, I dunno about that - I literally have WD 2 "Caviar" 420mb disks that STILL RUN from circa 1992-1994 here, believe-it-or-not! I have them running in the 1st system I ever built in fact, running Windows NT 3.51 SP#6 here:
486 Dx/4 133mhz
32mb "Fast Page" RAM
Dual WD 420mb "Caviars"
TekRam 16mb 30-pin "FastPage" RAM Caching VLB controller
Diamond "Stealth 64" Windows Accelerator vidcard
* Damned miracle that stuff's STILL "ticking" here (but I rarely use it to be honest). It's MORE of a 'momento' of the past, & where I started on PC's @ least.
"and every one that has come my way since then has been easily classified as loud and slow" - by Osgeld (1900440) on Tuesday March 06, @07:58PM (#39269047)
Man - you ought to look into "Raptors"/"Velociraptors" then... they truly "FLY" (10k rpm, 8-16mb buffers iirc, & quiet fluid-drive bearings, etc./et al).
* They're "the good stuff" in mechanical spinning HDD's @ least in my opinion!
APK
P.S.=> Have I ever had one "shit the bed" on me? Yes - I have owned every "raptor" since the 36gb models, & one "bit it" on me, & WD sent me one back in exchange (still runs great)... I had another "RaptorX" die, & what did WD do?
Heh - they sent me the "NEXT GEN" 10k rpm "Viking" as a replacement! Better, faster, QUIETER disk, & same great performance (better actually, due to SATA II vs. SATA I)... they cover their stuff excellently & honored my warranties!
Truthfully? I'd LOVE to work for them in the future in fact (when you believe in a company or product? Working for them's a pleasure, I think so @ least!)...
... apk
Hmm. I thought the replacement retained the warranty from the original drive.
I am John Hurt.
More HD storage consolidation. I saw an ad today in my email for a special sale for a 500GB HD for 120$... Yes if the Thai incident has taught us anything it is that globalization and consolidation of all HD storage companies into a few is a great thing for the consumer. Oh did I mention I love seeing that the warranties have gone from 3 and 5 years to 3 and 1 year. That is some great value to the consumers. This definitely seems to be going in the right direction. I know the last HD I bought was before the whole Thai BS, and it was a 2TB for 70$. Doesn't anyone think it odd that this is the only technology getting more expensive for the last year and a half. These companies are milking it for all it is worth. Anyway I not going to buy again until they reach prices I won't hate myself for paying.
So what's left of HGST, then? Ludicrously-price SAN boxes? Toshiba makes desktop drives too, so I'm puzzled by this reasoning.
There was a time when I would have said those were fightin' words. But actually, you're both right (maybe, AFAIK) and utterly completely wrong.
What happened is that the drive went through several revisions. The first one was the exact opposite of pure reliability; it was pure (as in nearly, and maybe exactly, 100.00%) epic fail. I worked at a place where we sold ATs with ST-251s and there was a year(?) there where every single one of those machines came back to us with disk failure. And it wasn't just one batch on a dropped pallet or something; it was all of 'em, worldwide, dying in months. It was in all the tech news too, though damned if I can conjure it up on Google; obviously Seagate has buried it, which goes to show how evil they are. ;-)
Seagate later allegedly revised whatever was totally broken about the drives, but by then, we were making sure to order non-Seagate drives, and (really, at the time) it was damn justified. Now that nearly a quarter century has passed, I ought to have some faith that every Seagate employee who worked on that model has either died of old age or had the good manners to commit suicide, but NO, speaking as someone who has never in his life made any sort of mistake, I say GRUDGE!!!!!1 GRUDGE!!! DEATH TO YOU, SEAGATE!!
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