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Western Digital To Buy SanDisk (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Reuters reports that Western Digital will buy SanDisk in a deal worth roughly $19 billion. In a press release, WD said, "The combination is the next step in the transformation of Western Digital into a storage solutions company with global scale, extensive product and technology assets, and deep expertise in non-volatile memory (NVM)." SanDisk has been in business since 1988, and primarily "manufactures flash memory chips and other digital storage for personal computers, data centers and consumer electronics, including smartphones and tablets." They have over 8,000 employees, compared to WD's ~76,000. This follows another major transaction in the storage market, when Dell bought EMC last week.
SSD's are typically right around $0.33/GB on the low end (up to 256GB), with prices closer to $0.30/GB at the higher end (480GB-1TB).
The best prices right now are around $40 for 120GB, $75-80 for 240/256GB, $150-170 for 480-512GB, and $300-ish for 960GB-1TB.
I interpret their relative slowness to market as doing proper testing before releasing product.
I had an array of 4 western digital 4TB drives. Added 2 Seagate 6TB drives, as they were the only company that produced them at the time. One failed after six months - replaced that one, the second died after another 4 or 5 months. I quickly bought two 6TB WD drives and mirrored the data before both Seagate drives failed again. The old 4TB WD drives are still running fine, as are the new 6TB drives, two years later.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
SSDs fell below $1/GB years ago. They've been stuck around $0.30-0.40/GB for a while.
The problem is that stock markets still expect the large companies to post revenue growth at the same rates as they did when they were smaller companies. Of course as they get larger and larger it becomes harder to keep up such growth. Growing a $10M company 5% is a lot easier than a $10B company. So they resort to buying other companies to get their growth. Or layoffs in order to improve their income statement.
Not that I agree with the methods because they are doing them just to help the stock price.
Flash prices are in freefall and package density is increasing proportionally.
We're starting to reach the point where flash is out-scaling hard drives on the high end. With hard drives you run in to really hard problems to solve when you try to cram a lot of platters in to a tiny space, and then try to mass-produce the things. Moving parts are the bane of.. Well.. Everything.
With flash you simply pack on some more chips. We're already starting to see SSDs that have a higher density and larger capacity than any available hard drive. Never mind that they're 10-20x faster to boot.
Sure they're more expensive but the price halfs every time density doubles. And that's happening every 6 months. I can go to costoco and pick up a high end, fast (120mb read, 40mb write) 128-fucking-gigabyte thumb sized flash drive for less than fifty bucks.
WD sees the writing on the wall. Mechanical hard drives will be on their way out in the near future and WD does not want to be anchored to a sinking industry.
Not entirely true.
There's the concept of a 'growth' stock versus a 'value' stock. Several tech companies (Microsoft, Apple, others) have transitioned into value stocks by starting to pay dividends, stock buybacks, etc.
Wall Street doesn't *only* care about growth. There's plenty of companies that have single-digit year-over-year gains that do very nicely.
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