Western Digital's Hitachi Storage Takeover Approved With Restrictions 156
angry tapir writes "Western Digital's plan to buy Hitachi Global Storage has run into U.S. FTC resistance: The U.S. FTC will require Western Digital to sell off assets used to manufacture desktop hard drives to a competitor as a condition of its U.S.$4.5 billion acquisition of rival Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, the agency has announced."
It looks like Toshiba is the competitor receiving the manufacturing assets.
More from the FTC: "Under the proposed settlement order, Toshiba will receive all of the productive assets needed to replicate Hitachi Global Storage Technologies' position in the desktop hard disk drive market. In addition, the settlement order requires Western Digital to provide Toshiba with access to its employees involved in research and development and the production of desktop hard disk drives, and also requires Western Digital to license all intellectual property needed to make and supply desktop hard disk drives to Toshiba. The settlement order also requires Western Digital to be available to supply Toshiba with certain components Toshiba will need to run the desktop hard disk drive business it acquires, and to contract manufacture hard disk drives for Toshiba until Toshiba is able to manufacture them on its own. The FTC also has appointed a monitor to oversee the sale of the assets to Toshiba and to keep the Commission informed about the status of the required divestiture."
Somehow this makes the sale fair? (Score:4, Interesting)
So Western Digital can buy Hitachi... but give everything that might possibly have been a competitive advantage away to Toshiba at a low cost?
Re:Somehow this makes the sale fair? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes. And, if it had been Hitachi buying Western Digital there would have been no strings attached, because the U.S. likes to shoot itself in it's own foot but will gladly help outsource whatever is left and destroy our economy at home. Sad tragedy...
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Re:Somehow this makes the sale fair? (Score:4, Informative)
Its called globalization. Its the future.
Judging by previous futures, it's overrated...
I was going to say the future is overrated based on past results,
but that keeps getting flagged as a parser error in module neocortex.
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Nationalism is almost immaterial. It is far more efficient to have a multi-tier topology in government (local stuff can be handled locally, national stuff can be handled nationally, international stuff can be handled internationally). I'd rather the boundaries be drawn according to cultures rather than according to 20th century national identities, since cultures tend to reflect the needs of that region, but something is better than nothing. Usually.
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Re:Somehow this makes the sale fair? (Score:5, Insightful)
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As long as you're willing to say the right prayer and wear the right clothes.
Say none. Wear none.
Hmmm, better live somewhere a bit warmer than this...
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The existence of separate nation states gives you the ability to emigrate from crappy countries to half-decent ones. Or from half-decent to better. One World means that no matter where you go, the rules are the same; don't like drug laws or censorship or state religion? Tough, where you gonna go?
And just how many disaffected citizens have the means or the desire to do such a thing?
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The fact that WD is acquiring Hitachi and not the reverse is surely an indicator that youre exaggerating?
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So Western Digital can buy Hitachi... but give everything that might possibly have been a competitive advantage away to Toshiba at a low cost?
It's that or move everything to a Thai flood plain. Which would you choose?
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WD makes the best drives I have ever used. I have about 20 of them in a server environment, and as of yet have not needed to use the 5 year warranty on any of them. RE3/4s are fantastic drives. As are VelociRaptors. Yes, they also have some crappier drives (caviar greens, for example), but you get what you pay for.
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This. Every WD HDD I've owned has died within the warranty period. I've had about an 80% failure rate within the warranty period at work. I use to be a Seagate fanboy and even risked buying three of the 1.5TB that had firmware problems (installed the patched firmware when I bought them and they're still running almost 5 years later). However, Seagate has definitely shown they've lost their way these past few years and I'm hesitant to risk buying from them again.
I was planning on buying some 4TB Hitachis to
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Without knowing more, I'd like postulate that it sounds more like "cheap ass power supply" than "cheap ass bearings."
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Very common failure mode for drives that run for a long time then powered down. Basically the motor is strong enough to keep the drive spinning, but too weak to spin it back up again after being stopped. Everything is okay so long as the computer is left running, but power it down and that drive will never come up again. This can be because of the motor failing, or the bearings going out
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I saw tons of complains of drives that have been used a few weeks and just go bad. Is this some kind of conspiracy meaning you will be required to buy new drives weather you like it or not.
I would also like to support manufacturers that have a bit more predictable weather on their plants that it has been lately...
Hitachi (IBM) Deathstars (Score:2, Interesting)
Worst drives I've ever owned.
Re:Hitachi (IBM) Deathstars (Score:5, Funny)
Dude that was literally a decade ago. Get over it.
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Next you'll tell me to get over the ST-225s that were dead out of the box.
Those were the worst drives I've ever owned.
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Dude get over the ST-225s that were dead out of the box
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Next you'll tell me to get over the ST-225s that were dead out of the box. Those were the worst drives I've ever owned.
DOA drives? If they're going to fail, that's the best time. The worst drives are those that last just long enough for you to fill them up with data, and then you think you can do without a backup copy while you repartition/reformat the drives you just emptied. Noooooooooooo I'm not bitter. (Yes, yes, I know I should have had a proper offline backup too.)
Re:Hitachi (IBM) Deathstars (Score:4, Informative)
My personal favorite is when you're trying to RMA the hard drive, and the person on the other end has you run a bunch of diagnostics that say the drive is fine.
It's like, come on guys, I am a tech, my case has its side off more often than on, I've spent a fair amount of my life tending to the needs and wants to a number of machines that have found their way to me...I know what the usual sounds those hard drives are supposed to make, having been running them for over a year, and one of them has suddenly started making scratching noises. Your diagnostics will be giving me a green light right while the drive drops / corrupts data and disappears randomly from the OS's view, right up until the day it's suddenly no longer detected. Even Windows will think something is wrong with the drive before your diagnostic program will.
I had to run the m*therf*cking acoustic test on one of Seagate's (or was it Maxtor's) drive before it would give me a code to send the thing in. Show of hands from the people who know how long it takes to run that test, with the machine unusable while you're running it.
re: RMA (Score:3)
Yep!! I've always hate doing hard drive RMAs. Honestly, it's to the point where the manufacturers should just accept them with a "no questions asked" policy for exchange during the length of their warranty period. Most of the people who lack the knowledge to adequately determine if a given drive is bad aren't capable of physically removing it from a computer and doing the RMA on it anyway.
I don't know about some of them, but my recent experiences with Seagate RMAs tells me it's pretty much a "one shot" exc
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Hmm. I thought the replacement retained the warranty from the original drive.
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My personal favorite is when you're trying to RMA the hard drive, and the person on the other end has you run a bunch of diagnostics that say the drive is fine.
Why would you talk to a human about this? I just fill out the web form and mail them back.
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I have an extremely good offline backup. Mind you, I've just filled 100 DVDs to capacity and expect to fill 1000 more. No, not from downloads. Family history project. A big family history project. A big and extremely EXPENSIVE family history project.
And the hard disk space I'm using isn't even a fraction of the capacity of a modern hard drive.
Offline backup, these days, is getting very difficult to justify.
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Generically, I am collecting scans of photos and negatives ranging from 1860 to the modern day for (currently five) strands of the family tree, which I am attempting to organize by date and location. That way, I can see how people, places, culture/society change with place and time, in addition to having as complete as possible conventional pictorial biography of everyone in the family tree. It is a nightmare to organize (most of the negative packets have little or no labeling) or index (databases are not g
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I was a scandal. Seagate shipped a whole warehouse full of drives they knew to be bad as an accounting trick. They had all failed testing, but were still being carried as an asset.
So in general you're right, DOA is better then the alternative. Running laps to the parts store sucked. Finding any working drive was a challenge for a while there. Like a thai flood, but being denied at the time.
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Funny thing is I managed to run one of those DeskStars for a decade - it was running until about April last year - with no problems. Only spun down when moving house, in power failures, and when I needed to replace a power supply fan in the machine. I replaced it with a WD Blue last year.
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Isn't it interesting how stuff like this sticks in people's minds and they seem incapable of evaluating new data and reevaluating their stance? The longevity of opinions like this seems to increase when there is some cute catch phrase involved, such as "Deathstar" in this instance.
"To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods."
-Robert A. Heinlein
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My cousin has over 10,000 HDs in his datacenter and he told me Hitachi fail the least for him.
Was good enough for me.
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Same here. Drives die all the time but Seagates and WDs more than any Hitachi.
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Worst drives I've ever owned.
WD 1TB Caviar Black AAKS drives were the worst I've owned in recent years.
I experienced a 50% failure rate within 24 months for 8 units I was running personally. One of my clients who does server virtualization experienced approximately 30% failure rates with his 40 drives.
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Worse than the ST-251? That drive is why I don't buy Seagate. ;-)
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No one remembers the ST-251 scandal? (Score:2)
There was a time when I would have said those were fightin' words. But actually, you're both right (maybe, AFAIK) and utterly completely wrong.
What happened is that the drive went through several revisions. The first one was the exact opposite of pure reliability; it was pure (as in nearly, and maybe exactly, 100.00%) epic fail. I worked at a place where we sold ATs with ST-251s and there was a year(?) there where every single one of those machines came back to us with dis
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FTC? (Score:4, Insightful)
Companies will stop spending on R&D because they will need to give all their research away for free if they want to buy another company.
Re:FTC? (Score:4, Informative)
Because it isn't a single company controlling all the channels.
And they aren't giving it away fro free. They are selling it for 4.5 billion.
.
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Since when is selling manufacturing assets giving everything away?
Re:FTC? (Score:5, Informative)
I know the summary is confusing (as usual), but read it slowly before complaining:
WD wants to buy Hitachi Global Storage.
Hitachi Global Storage manufactures desktop drives that compete with WD.
The FTC requires WD to sell off the parts of *Hitachi* that make desktop drives to a competitor (Toshiba) before completing the acquisition of Hitachi.
WD does not have to do anything with their existing disk manufacturing business / R&D / whatever.
Re: Mod Parent Up (Score:2)
Ahh, that makes sense now. I was wondering what Western Digital would be without its disk manufacturing capability. The next Creative Labs, I suppose.
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How is it supposed to get better for consumers if the number of companies that can actually compete in the marketplace gets consolidated down even further?
And this?
Companies will stop spending on R&D because they will need to give all their research away for free if they want to buy another company.
Completely unsubstantiated, fear mongering bullshit.
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Or, total crap.
That happens as well. If a company thinks it will make more money by doing something, it will go right ahead and do it.
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WD is selling off none of its own R&D - everything they are selling off has been developed by the company they are purchasing. There is no issue of appropriation here.
Insightful? I guess the libertarians have all the mod points today.
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How exactly is it supposed to get better for consumers if the government forces companies to give everything they have to a competitor in order to get permission to buy another company?
Companies will stop spending on R&D because they will need to give all their research away for free if they want to buy another company.
Or, you know, it might discourage them from buying a competitor in order to keep the competitive advantage they got via their R&D. Which is the point. It's better for consumers to discourage acquisitions and keep the market as competitive as possible.
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Samsung makes nice drives as well..
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Yep, just when my personal experience teaches me to go with (pre-4k) WD and Samsung, and avoid Seagate and Hitachi, the bad is going to pollute the good.
No doubt others are thinking that WD is going to ruin Hitachi and Samsung is going to ruin Seagate.
That's the thing about hard drives. Some brands work for some people and other brands work for other people, and there's seemingly no rhyme or reason to it.
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I think people just go by whatever died first on them. I'm prejudiced against Maxtor and WD because I lost data from failures in the 90s, and I've avoided them both ever since. I've had a number of Seagates in the past decade that have started making scary noises that forced me to retire them, but I've never actually lost data on them so they still kind of sit in the "pretty good" category in my head.
I've had no problems at all with any of my Samsungs, though, so that is sad to see them go. I bought a pair
No good hard drives left (Score:2)
This will leave no good desk top hard drives being made. WD was the last decent brand.
Re:No good hard drives left (Score:5, Informative)
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So actually the deal was that WD couldn't buy ALL of Hitachi's HD assets and has to find a seller for part of them.
I've seen this before when Gould was purchased by a Japanese firm and they were forced to divest themselves of the computer division (which I was working for at the time).
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WD was the last decent brand.
Seagate, Samsung, and Hitachi (which hopefully Toshiba won't ruin) all make very decent drives - all (including WD) have some lemons, but all are good on the whole. I'm not sure what measure you're using, but I suspect it's anecdotal.
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Seagate and Samsung are forming a strategic alliance
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?name=seagate-completes-aquisition-samsungs-hdd-business-pr&vgnextoid=b201b5c033854310VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD&locale=en-US&name=seagate-completes-aquisition-samsungs-hdd-business-pr&vgnextrefresh=1&cmpid=lp_press_pr [seagate.com]
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WD are turning into shit at the moment. Weve had so many WD blues die on regular workstations its rediculous at work.
Luckily the black and RE drives seem good still.
I have had terrible experiences with the Caviar Blacks, and the Caviar Greens are easily the worst. You can't just swap a PCB now, part of the ROM resides on the PCB, and the Greens park the drive heads every 8 or so seconds to reduce power consumption, I have seen an inordinate number of mechanical failures that were WD Blacks and Greens, though recently they have been almost exclusively greens.
I have switched all my drives to 2TB Samsung F3s and 7200rpm Hitachi 2TBs.
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You do know about wdidle3, don't you?
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And yes, WD MyBook drives are absolute shit too. Don't use them for backups. They last about year or so and that's it.
I'll see your anecdote and call: I have a 500GB WD MyBook from 2006-ish working perfectly as a Dish extended storage drive for the past 2 years, and a Time Machine target before that... it's a bit louder and noisier than I'd have liked (and I'm now using a 2.5" Firewire drive as my backup target), but it's ticking along fine.
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I have 400 WD5002ABYS in racks out in our computational farm, and we lose one every year or so. 0.25%/year failure rate is pretty good in MyBook..
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Very reliable, very noisy, replaced with an Intel G2 SSD in my computer. Hopefully similar reliability (looks that way), much faster and completely silent. 10K desktop market is dead in the water. But it's a good drive, I give you that.
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Did it never occur to you that they intentionally crippled their TLER settings _precisely_ because the drives would crap out after 30 days of continuous use in a RAID config? (Well, and because higher TLER is better for single drive configs.) The drives are optimized for slow bulk storage which is why they have long TLER and low RPM and in my experience they do a great job. 90+% of people complaining of failures bought these thinking they could make a cheap RAID despite all the warnings and frankly got w
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Western Digital is pretty clear about things. They don't intentionally design their desktop disks to fail in a RAID. Other brands may work better for you for a variety of reasons. But you seem to be mistaken about what's happening with the TLER setting. In fact the desktop drives have no TLER in their firmware at all. Thus when they get bad sectors and have to reallocate, they end up bogging down and the array will kick them out. The enterprise drives do have TLER, which changes the way the error reco
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Not quite the full story.
Most, if not all, cheap to moderately expensive SOHO NASes use software raid. And since SOHO customers typically care more about data loss than performance, Bad Sector recovery is preferable to TLER (it's "safer" as far as your bits are concerned). NAS mfrs know this, and software raid is pretty flexible, and as such have fairly long timeouts. With long timeouts (several minutes or more), it's rare for a SOHO NAS to kick a non-TLER drive out of the array, and even if it did, the dri
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Crazy conspiracy theory (Score:2)
Wow, bring on the crazy conspiracy theories. LTER=0 is what you want for a single-drive desktop configuration; LTER=7 is a good value for a RAID. This isn't them "cripping" the drive. It's setting a sensible default for the drive's intended market. If you want to use the drive in a different way, JUST CHANGE THE SETTING.
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The WDTLER util doesn't work? That does suck. Guess I won't be buying WD for a while.
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I've heard that before. It always seemed like a heat problem to me.
Improving it is easy: Stand the drive on edge, and prop up one end slightly to let air enter the bottom. Instant chimney-effect cooling.
Oh no! (Score:5, Funny)
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This is the one you really want to watch: Mr. T puts the T in IT [youtu.be]
Toshiba == FAIL. (Score:2)
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yeah, I had a Satellite, and the battery life quickly got lower and lower
not to mention being sold with Vista but not the hardware to run Vista
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Toshiba is one of the world leaders in 2.5" drives though. I can remember when they made 3.5" drives and they weren't bad either. They gave those up due to profit reasons a number of years ago.
What's A "Desktop" Drive? (Score:2)
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Kinda. "Enterprise" SATA drives are identical to desktop drives except for the firmware these days.
10/15krpm drives are a different story of course.
What goes around, comes around! (Score:3, Interesting)
Raid harddrives (Score:2)
With everyone talking about raids and stuff....How do I find "raid" harddrives on newegg?
effin great (Score:2)
I stopped buying WD's like 15 years ago cause they tended to last about a year and then shit on themselves, and every one that has come my way since then has been easily classified as loud and slow, ie: I have some 40 and 80 gigs that only support ata 66 and 100 while being loud enough to drown out my video card fan around here somewhere...
Hitachi's on the other hand I have never had a problem with, heck I have a 540 meg laptop drive in my 386 lappy that runs as quiet as the day it was new (it came with my
Just wonderful, just what we needed... (Score:2)
More HD storage consolidation. I saw an ad today in my email for a special sale for a 500GB HD for 120$... Yes if the Thai incident has taught us anything it is that globalization and consolidation of all HD storage companies into a few is a great thing for the consumer. Oh did I mention I love seeing that the warranties have gone from 3 and 5 years to 3 and 1 year. That is some great value to the consumers. This definitely seems to be going in the right direction. I know the last HD I bought was before the