Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Western Digital To Buy SanDisk (reuters.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the go-big-or-go-home dept.

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.

3 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Writing on the wall by sshir · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So WD realized that hard drive business is kaput.

    No wonder we're still waiting for a 8TB consumer drive from them. They are curbing research spending...

    1. Re:Writing on the wall by 0123456 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The only people still on conventional hard drives for 'important' games are people who play Candy Crush and people who are poor college students.

      LOL WUT?

      New games are often 30+GB. My Steam folder is well over 1TB. I'm not buying a 2TB SSD that would probably cost more than the games did.

  2. Re:Cost per MB/GB/TB is ony one measure by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This doesn't account for actual usage of drive space, people with 8 TB drives might need 8TB of space, but most people STILL don't need that much space.

    There's a real problem at the very price-sensitive low end, where you need to provision an embedded device with just enough storage to boot off and store its logs. Several times we've ended up buying low-capacity SSDs from... not entirely salubrious Chinese manufacturers because they're the only ones that can hit the required price point. Everyone's chasing the high-end as-large-a-capacity-as-possible unit-sales market, but sourcing a consignment of 8GB SSDs where you're ready to order a container-load of them at once is near impossible from known-brand manufacturers.