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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.
I don't like the recent tread of consolidation in the IT market... This needs to stop.
What does WD do with 76,000 employees? R&D? Manufacturing? Sales? Distribution?
That just seems like a lot of employees.
load "linux",8,1
What we learned today: Western Digital still exists.
Yes I assure you, we are quite safe from your "competition" here.
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...
You remember before verizon bought alltel there was the big five? Alltel had unlimited data both for phones and aircards. After verizon bought them? None of those plans are offered anymore. And the fcc said it wouldn't hurt competition yeah I still don't see that.
No tmobile does not count that's unlimited 2g only. Although I'm sure verizon would be happy to let me pay for unlimited QNC again If I could find a phone that was still compatible.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
As long as they don't bother encrypting them.
But I recently rebuilt my FreeNAS file server with five 1TB WD Red NAS hard drives for $50 each. A nice upgrade over the Seagate and Hitachi drives that all reported heat-related errors after five years of 24/7 service.
The idea behind free market has always been that whenever there is a buck to be made somebody will endeavor to make it
However, the reality that we live in doesn't work like that --- your exmple of Verizon's acquisition of Alltel which puts further burdens on the consumer, and TFA's WD gobbling up SanDisk are but two of the many examples of how the big corps are fucking up the market place and nobody can do anything about it!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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.
They already did: I bought my 500GB Crucial MX200 for 160€.
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.
Agreed with parent - my own 500GB Crucial BX100 cost me ~$215 on newegg back in March ($0.43/GB), and now retails on newegg for $180 ($0.36/GB)... a $35 drop in 7 months.
This leads to a question: Who the frig is stupid enough to still be paying $1/GB for SSD disk?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
If your business $1B cash, that adds $1B to its value.
If your business owns $800 million worth of Sandisk, that adds $800 million to its value.
Therefore, spending $1 billion to buy a company worth less than $1B HURTS the company's value. See HP for some dramatic examples.
The value (stock price) increases only if you get a good deal on the purchase, if you buy a company for less than it is worth. So companies make aquisitions when they think they're getting a good deal. Who doesn't like getting a good deal?
Many computer manufacturers still charge ~$1/GB for SSDs.
Gods help you if your new machine takes an unusual SSD or is hard to disassemble.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I loved SanDisk's Sansa Fuze. I prefer to have a separate device for my music. Unfortunately, all the subsequent versions really sucked. I hope Western Digital creates a worthy successor.
Tmobile currently sells unlimited LTE, you just have to pay more than their basic plan :P
Yes on smart phone's only. plans for hotspots/aircards/tablets appear to max out at 11gb (rather odd imho as verizon will let you select up to a 100gb online) unlimited LTE is not offered.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I was talking about actual value of the purchase, not book value.
If adding 0.8B will make it worth $4B, it IS worth approximately $3.2B, in terms of whether or not it's a good deal. That's the value I was speaking of.
Since it's worth 3.2 to company A, if they buy it for 2.2, they got a good deal. When valuing companies with significant growth potential, you do in fact factor that potential into the value, so much so that it's often a much larger factor than book value.
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.
And consider this, in the next 2-4 years, we'll see a huge drop in SSD pricing as new drives come online with new technology giving 16 TB storage with performances exceeding Spinning drives (not to mention new, higher bus speeds needed).
This is one of the clearest signals that the era of Spinning drives is nearing its end. They will be all but gone within 5-8 years. Add in cloud based storage (BackBlaze style) and you don't need 8TB unless you're a Photographer or hoarder.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
> The 200 Million extra spend could easily be eaten up by R&D costs and lost market share. This could be a strategic purchase, not a financial one.
The company I work for was just aquired under just such a scenario. The board had three options:
R&D the needed tech: $40 million
Lease license the needed tech: $30 million
Buy a company who had the tech: $20 million
That IS a financial decision, I'd say.
Ps - I don't know how many million the actual costs were for the company I work for. I do know that buying the subsidiary made better financial sense than doing the R&D or licensing the tech.
Why? Are they the only company making SSDs? Seems to me WD sees that SSDs will eventually replace spinning media for most applications and want to be prepared. I'm surprised it took them this long.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Sure, I've had the odd lemon WD drive, but every Seagate drive I've owned failed before or not log after it's warranty was up.
I confirmed this with an acquaintance who runs an enormous disk array for a university. They switched exclusively to WD Reds after atrocious failure rates with Seagate drives, and a pilot where they tested Samsung drives.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Name some? I paid $300 for my Samsung 840 EVO SSD (500GB) back in Dec 2013. Almost 2 years ago the price was under $1/GB
You can now get the 850 model for $180.
I am a WD beta tester. I can assure they do beta test their products with real people before release. Best part of being a tester...you get to keep all the gear.
Companies like Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and HP all charge $0.80-$1.00 per gigabyte, sometimes even more, to preconfigure many of their systems with SSDs.
If your PC is easy to disassemble and is compatible with any 2.5"/M.2/m.SATA drive you can buy a cheap aftermarket drive like the 850 EVO (I've seen that 500GB hit $135).
But if your machine is glued together (like the Surface Pro) or uses a non-standard interface (like the MacBook Air) you're pretty well screwed. Even M.2 compatibility is hit and miss, especially with all the variants (30/42/60/80/110mm length, M/B/M+B keying, SATA/PCI-e 2.0/3.0 x2/x4, AHCI/NVMe...)
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Many computer manufacturers still charge ~$1/GB for SSDs.
See my earlier post on this, at the low end you're paying several dollars per GB unless you want to go to no-name Chinese vendors.
They also bought STEC in 2013, a manufacturer of mostly PCI-Express based Enterprise Flash drives.
8 GB is still a $40 overage fee if your ISP charges $5 per GB. If you can't get cable or DSL, you're stuck on satellite or fixed cellular.
Someone who wants power loss protection of unwritten data?
SSDs use "wear leveling", which spreads out writes to all pages. This means even if a page can only be rewritten 5,000 times, you'll write to tens of of thousands of other pages before you write to this one again. Is the total amount that can be written and overwritten to an SSD really that much lower than what is written to a hard drive over its life?