Western Digital buys hitachi for 4.3B

Every hard drive maker on the planet has its adherents and detractors. Every single one has people who say it's never failed them, and people who will swear every drive from them always has. Doesn't matter if it's WD, Seagate, Hitachi, LaCie, Maxtor, anyone.
 
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I completely agree with David ; I've used WD for more than 10 years and haven't had a failing disk (yet). This is good news for us since both companies are likely to share technologies and expertise to develop even better and more reliable drives.
 
Hmmm... just out of curiosity: are hard drive's and components all actually built in-house and differ from brand to brand? I would assume they'd use a lot of the same parts made by some chinese company... which if that was the case, the branding really wouldn't matter.
 
ryan brown said:
Hmmm... just out of curiosity: are hard drive's and components all actually built in-house and differ from brand to brand? I would assume they'd use a lot of the same parts made by some chinese company... which if that was the case, the branding really wouldn't matter.
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There are like HDD manufacturers in the world; Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Toshiba/Fujitsu, and Samsung. Both WD and Segate have around 30% market share each, Hitachi has around 20% and Toshiba/Fujitsu and Samsung have around 10% each.

With the merger of WD and Hitachi operations will be a significantly larger than the competition, the HDD market will become a two horse race. I wouldn't be surprised if Seagate follows suit with a merger with the smaller two. A lot of it has to do with the IP portfolios that each company has in their possession, Hitachi + WD IP makes a formidable force.

The real issue is that a lot of these components have become highly commoditized, there is very little profit to be made in making these devices. Contrary to what you've been hearing SSD still have long way to go before capturing large marketshare away from HDDs, its expected to reach less than 10% of the market by 2014, but the HDD market will shrink over time. This is inevitable.

And yes, core components are usually made in China (and some in Thailand), part of that has to do with the fact that HDD use permanent rare earth magnets (neodymium) in its manufacturing. China controls over 90% of the world's rare earth magnet production, and there are very tight export controls that China enforces (for various political reasons). For this reason, a low-margin product such as a HDD requires the very vast majority of production center in China to insure HDD manufacturering supply chain is not disrupted.

But there are differences between various brands in terms of reliability. Seagate in particular had a huge issue with faulty drives a little over a year ago.
 
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