Hitachi to merge with Toshiba and Fujitsu - new HDD company

[Hockster]

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9849275-7.html?tag=nefd.top

The new company would combine the limping hard drive divisions of Hitachi and Toshiba as well as some of the storage systems technology from Fujitsu. Each would own a third.

[xlink]

need faster drives...

[One_Hertz]

need competition to seagate...

[RedBull78]

15k Sata hd anyone?

That would be so amazing have 4 of then in raid and just benchmark them all day and get girls.

[gallardo]

need faster drives...

Need cheap SSDs...

[XS Janus]

Good mowe more chance of long term survival against upcoming SSD revoultion...

[Papu]

Good mowe more chance of long term survival against upcoming SSD revoultion...

no , they need to be first to get cheap ssd's out , then they win \0/

[The_Beast]

cheaper drives for everyone????

[Serra]

I'm a little more pro-competition than most of the people here I guess. Instead of 5-6 companies competing, we'll have 3 with a less-than-optimal lack of overlay in some areas.

Well, there's always a very good chance that Toshiba &/or Fuji will say "no" and it would take at least a year or two to get a team of PMs to figure out the best way to combine them... so I guess there's at least a few years of good competition left, maybe by then SSDs will drop to where I can afford them with a small pay raise.

[MaxxxRacer]

The funny thing is that these 3 drive manf. consist of 99% of the laptop HDD market. Atlest for OEM's. If you open up virtually any laptop on the market today (or in the past 5 years), they will almost always have a Hitachi, Toshiba or Fujitsu HDD. No OEM's, as far as I have seen use Seagate of WD, which seem to be the only other two manf. that make laptop drives.

[JoeBar]

And the name would be...?


HiToFu maybe??? :lol2:

[Start]

The funny thing is that these 3 drive manf. consist of 99% of the laptop HDD market. Atlest for OEM's. If you open up virtually any laptop on the market today (or in the past 5 years), they will almost always have a Hitachi, Toshiba or Fujitsu HDD. No OEM's, as far as I have seen use Seagate of WD, which seem to be the only other two manf. that make laptop drives.

I believed Apple uses Seagate for their notebook line. But look at what happened to them for using it :rolleyes:

[halo112358]

I'm surprised everyone thinks this is good. Consolidation is almost never good for the consumer, now we've got less competition so there's less incentive for them to keep prices low.

[One_Hertz]

I'm surprised everyone thinks this is good. Consolidation is almost never good for the consumer, now we've got less competition so there's less incentive for them to keep prices low.

Thing is, those companies couldn't really compete too well before and now perhaps they can. There is a reason they are merging.

[Afterburner]

And the name would be...?


HiToFu maybe??? :lol2:
:lol2:

[AliG]

All I want is for samsung to finally release their 320gb f1 drive, that should be plenty fast, faster than the raptors at least

[Ugly n Grey]

Hard disks will be around a long time yet... SSD's will find their way into PC's sure... but the densities are small and will be for quiet some time. As to these three merging... meh... they aren't the real competition anyhow. None of them ever had that much market share to begin with even Hitachi getting smacked by picking up IBM's line in the middle of the failing deskbomb err ....deskstar debacle. I suspect Tosh and Fujistsu would have sold outright if they had been asked. No one did.

[rob[GL]]

need competition to seagate...

Why?

[Soulburner]

The funny thing is that these 3 drive manf. consist of 99% of the laptop HDD market. Atlest for OEM's. If you open up virtually any laptop on the market today (or in the past 5 years), they will almost always have a Hitachi, Toshiba or Fujitsu HDD. No OEM's, as far as I have seen use Seagate of WD, which seem to be the only other two manf. that make laptop drives.
Dell uses both WD and Seagate. Our 1520 has a WD Scorpio 250GB drive.

[Skyline GT-R]

The funny thing is that these 3 drive manf. consist of 99% of the laptop HDD market. Atlest for OEM's. If you open up virtually any laptop on the market today (or in the past 5 years), they will almost always have a Hitachi, Toshiba or Fujitsu HDD. No OEM's, as far as I have seen use Seagate of WD, which seem to be the only other two manf. that make laptop drives.

My HP has a Seagate :) And if this will bring us 10-15k rpm 500GB SATA drives for a low price, I'm all up for it. (eventhough I prefer Seagate drives)

[Clint]

I'm surprised everyone thinks this is good. Consolidation is almost never good for the consumer, now we've got less competition so there's less incentive for them to keep prices low.

Yes, elementary.
Oligopoly or such is never good for us consumers.:shakes:

[stevecs]

Yeah but neither is a monopoly and that's pretty much where we're heading w/ Seagate being the biggest fish in the sea for HD's. Given the choice I'd rather have 2-3 company's competing than just one even though I am partial to seagate drives.

[jinu117]

Looking at how memory price has been I wouldn't be surprised if SSD will have strong future for OS drive in shorter time than what some of us are thinking.
One important thing is... every one is forgetting some things that has been in development. Different way of SSD... (remember those with optical and laser technology while back which had incredible density with not much of actualy moving part? Probably pretty close from actualization at this point is my guess).

[stevecs]

I doubt it. We've been trying to find something to fill in the 'access time gap' between memory & HD's for well over 25-30 years now. SSD's show some promise but the main killer for that technology is the limited writes. Until they can get several orders of magnitude more writes out of it, it will always be a nitch market player. Personally I'm looking towards the carbon nanotube 'memory' modules. but that's at least 10+ years out I would think.

[zanzabar]

i dont see this being bad for the desktop market but for the server and laptop this will be a near monopoly i cant even think of anything other than fujitsu that i would buy for performance and stability and hitatchi for a cheap one and there is no others in that market for real use. and if ur in sas then fujitsu is ur only reliable pick for a 15k rpm

[FischOderAal]

I believed Apple uses Seagate for their notebook line. But look at what happened to them for using it :rolleyes:

mine has a Toshiba :p