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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?
Dude that was literally a decade ago. Get over it.
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.
WD has to sell Toshiba Hitachi's desktop HD assets, not their own. So you can continue to buy your raptors.
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.
My personal favorite is when you're trying to RMA the hard drive, and the person on the other end has you run a bunch of diagnostics that say the drive is fine.
It's like, come on guys, I am a tech, my case has its side off more often than on, I've spent a fair amount of my life tending to the needs and wants to a number of machines that have found their way to me...I know what the usual sounds those hard drives are supposed to make, having been running them for over a year, and one of them has suddenly started making scratching noises. Your diagnostics will be giving me a green light right while the drive drops / corrupts data and disappears randomly from the OS's view, right up until the day it's suddenly no longer detected. Even Windows will think something is wrong with the drive before your diagnostic program will.
I had to run the m*therf*cking acoustic test on one of Seagate's (or was it Maxtor's) drive before it would give me a code to send the thing in. Show of hands from the people who know how long it takes to run that test, with the machine unusable while you're running it.
I am John Hurt.
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.
That's why a copy of spinrite is your friend, set that sucker on level 3, refresh the surfaces, and if the drive is dying that'll kill the bitch dead QUICK. Just let it run overnight, the drive will be so foobarred by morning they can have you run whatever, it won't matter. Wish I could find a tool that would kill drives as well as spinrite as there are a few of the newer drives it don't like but so far nothing kills a dying drive like spinrite can.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.