Western Digital to buy Hitachi disk unit

another one bites the dust

Western Digital Agrees to Buy Hitachi Unit for $4.3 Billion - Bloomberg

From my perspective, the worst buys out one of the best. Too bad, I've always liked IBM - oops - I mean Hitachi hard drives. :sarc:

Bye.

The IBM Deathstars... I mean Deskstars were good. Only 11 out of 12 I installed went bad. I still have that HD somewhere.

i will be waiting for my WD Deathstars lol

Never had issue with WD, the worst I've had from them was a 1st gen raptor that died after a short 2 years.

Too bad - one more competitor gone. I like my Hitachies. They work well. Fujitsu is another good one.

Heh... I have an Hitachi right now... they're gonna go instinct by now? That's sad.

WD = Best Hard drives ever. I only swear by WD now. The Hitachi one I have was given to me so, don't question ^_^

A friend asked for help recently when the Hitachi drive he was running "bit the dust"! I gave him an old WD but then the board let go so I set him up with one of my old XP cases for the time being.

WD will certainly make improvements when the new (former)Hitachis are seen. It will interesting to see how those stack up in comparisons.

Only issues we had with WD were a few 150Gb Raptors.
Had more problem with Seagate, though that was years ago.

I replaced a Seagate on an old '95 Packard Bell a decade ago to get that running again but when first getting into custom cases even earlier a specialist pointed me at WDs which have been run since.

Over all those years a pair of old ides stuffed and that was about it. Never OS a Green Power model however. That's WD's enery saver series of drives good for storage/backup not performance.

With the buyout of Hitachi you stilll have to wonder which way the production line leans towards for those. GP large capacity, Blue, Black edition, RE Enterprise, or a totally new lineup of models to be introduced if not simply expanding their production base.

Between our two sons and myself we have had too many WD's burn out!
We are mostly SeaGate fans now.

Well our oldest son went MAC on us, pretty damn smart of him I think!
No more late night upgrades, blue screens and etc!

MACs aren't infallible and the only reason updates aren't as much an issue for them is because they charge for their updates.

Perhaps when I'm a billionaire I'll consider them a viable alternative.

I've worked in the IT field for 14 years now and have seen failures of pretty much every brand of hard drive. Maxtor, connor, seagate, western digital, toshiba, hitachi, ibm, samsung, etc.

Generally speaking, my worst experiences have been with Maxtor and my best experiences have been with WD and Seagate. Between WD and Seagate, I tend to prefer WD these days as they haven't have the cataclymic failures with certain firmware versions such as the infamous Seagate 7200.11.

RLHoldenSr said:

Well our oldest son went MAC on us, pretty damn smart of him I think!
No more late night upgrades, blue screens and etc!

Click to expand...

Also had handfuls of MAC's over the years in my work environments, and they too fail I'm afraid. Motherboards give out, drive controllers die, monitors give out. If you are under the impression that they never die, just sit outside an Apple store at the mall for an hour or so and see how many people lug in an imac, macbook, etc for repairs. It's not all sunshine and rainbows.

pparks, thanks for putting things into perspective. There is no piece of hardware or software that will not fail eventually - that is something I learned during my 35 years in the trade.

pparks1 said:

I've worked in the IT field for 14 years now and have seen failures of pretty much every brand of hard drive. Maxtor, connor, seagate, western digital, toshiba, hitachi, ibm, samsung, etc.

Generally speaking, my worst experiences have been with Maxtor and my best experiences have been with WD and Seagate. Between WD and Seagate, I tend to prefer WD these days as they haven't have the cataclymic failures with certain firmware versions such as the infamous Seagate 7200.11.

RLHoldenSr said:

Well our oldest son went MAC on us, pretty damn smart of him I think!
No more late night upgrades, blue screens and etc!

Click to expand...

Also had handfuls of MAC's over the years in my work environments, and they too fail I'm afraid. Motherboards give out, drive controllers die, monitors give out. If you are under the impression that they never die, just sit outside an Apple store at the mall for an hour or so and see how many people lug in an imac, macbook, etc for repairs. It's not all sunshine and rainbows.

Click to expand...

Don't they call them logic boards??

Maguscreed said:

MACs aren't infallible and the only reason updates aren't as much an issue for them is because they charge for their updates.

Perhaps when I'm a billionaire I'll consider them a viable alternative.

Click to expand...

Macs infallable? I can have someone pass along numerous viruses seen for that OS? if you want! He cleans off that other guy's OS quite often as well as pcs working in a repair shop.

As for any brand of drive failing at times people often forget they are mass produced on production lines and why the companies provided limited warrantys in case any fail from a defect.

I've been fortunate not to see any WD fail on me while one used drive passed along eventually became worn out. A friend saw a few WDs with bad sectors when he first got them new.

The one other things often overlooked by more people then you would think are things like keeping drive temps down as well as occasional defrags, etc. Too often drives are simply neglected and end up seeing more wear and tear in a shorter period of time.

Now we will simply need to wait and see how and if any quality suffers from the buyout once everything at Hitachi is retooled by WD. Hopefully the turn out will be similar to what was seen for ATI chips once AMD bought ATI out with improvements.