Western Digital To Buy SanDisk (reuters.com) 99
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.
Emperor WD (Score:3)
Yes I assure you, we are quite safe from your "competition" here.
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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.
Cost per MB/GB/TB is ony one measure (Score:2)
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-
Re:Cost per MB/GB/TB is ony one measure (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
There's a real problem at the very price-sensitive low end, where you need to provision an embedded device with just enough storage to boot off and store its logs. Several times we've ended up buying low-capacity SSDs from... not entirely salubrious Chinese manufacturers because they're the only ones that can hit the required price point. Everyone's chasing the high-end as-large-a-capacity-as-possible unit-sales market, but sourcing a consignment of 8GB SSDs where you're ready to order a container-load of them at once is near impossible from known-brand manufacturers.
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They already did: I bought my 500GB Crucial MX200 for 160€.
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Agreed with parent - my own 500GB Crucial BX100 cost me ~$215 on newegg back in March ($0.43/GB), and now retails on newegg [newegg.com] 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?
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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.
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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 [newegg.com] for $180.
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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, espec
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Many computer manufacturers still charge ~$1/GB for SSDs.
See my earlier post [slashdot.org] on this, at the low end you're paying several dollars per GB unless you want to go to no-name Chinese vendors.
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Someone who wants power loss protection of unwritten data?
Re:In other words (Score:4, Informative)
SSDs fell below $1/GB years ago. They've been stuck around $0.30-0.40/GB for a while.
Re: In other words (Score:2)
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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.
Free market, anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
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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!
The idea behind the free market is that there are no artificial barriers to entry.
Free Marketeers have always concentrated on government created barriers and ignored those created by private entities to prevent competition. Because of this, the free market in purity has never worked.
Bits of the free market work when applied correctly, the same with regulation, the same with capitalism and the same with socialism. However all of these ideologies fail horribly when they're applied to the extreme.
A fe
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Tmobile currently sells unlimited LTE, you just have to pay more than their basic plan :P
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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.
More consolidation... (Score:3)
I don't like the recent tread of consolidation in the IT market... This needs to stop.
Re:More consolidation... (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, we'll stop it. We didn't know it was bothering you. Sorry.
signed -- Worldwide IT Business
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Of course they won't stop voluntarily. That is why we have anti monopoly laws that needs to be enforced if a competitive market is to remain.
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Please! Mark parent as Funny
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While GP may have been right in principle, the fact is that Western Digital and Sandisk were in two related, but completely different markets. One made hard disk drives, and only moved into SSDs when the latter started getting popular as a successor to HDDs. The other has been making flash memory throughout its history of all form factors ever defined - Compact Flash, MMC, SD cards, xD cards, Memory Sticks, Micro-SDs, Memory SIMs, you name it!!! Two completely different product genres for completely di
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This has our backing as well.
signed -- The Elders of the Internet.
Re:More consolidation... (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that stock markets still expect the large companies to post revenue growth at the same rates as they did when they were smaller companies. Of course as they get larger and larger it becomes harder to keep up such growth. Growing a $10M company 5% is a lot easier than a $10B company. So they resort to buying other companies to get their growth. Or layoffs in order to improve their income statement.
Not that I agree with the methods because they are doing them just to help the stock price.
bad buys HURT the stock price. See HP (Score:2)
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
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Therefore, spending $1 billion to buy a company worth less than $1B HURTS the company's value. See HP for some dramatic examples.
Not always true. For one example: Company A buys company B for $2.2B, but company B is only "worth" $2B. You say company A is taking a $200M loss. Looks bad at the outset, but looks can be deceiving... read on:
But what if Company B had the potential to be a $4B value, but lacked, say for the sake of argument, $800M to ramp up production. Then Company A, that has the capital, would GAIN $1B for their investment ( 2.2B + 0.8B = $3B spent for a $4B company ). I would consider this a "good deal" on the purch
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Except that in reality, if they want Company B's shareholders to approve the transaction, they need to show them some value. Company B's shareholders could liquidate their shares for $2B on the market any time they want, or they could get $2.2B (on paper, and perhaps more) by approving this deal in a timely fashion and not raising a stink.
Add it to the cost of business.
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Therefore, spending $1 billion to buy a company worth less than $1B HURTS the company's value. See HP for some dramatic examples.
Not always true. For one example: Company A buys company B for $2.2B, but company B is only "worth" $2B. You say company A is taking a $200M loss. Looks bad at the outset, but looks can be deceiving... read on:
But what if Company B had the potential to be a $4B value, but lacked, say for the sake of argument, $800M to ramp up production. Then Company A, that has the capital, would GAIN $1B for their investment ( 2.2B + 0.8B = $3B spent for a $4B company ). I would consider this a "good deal" on the purchase, even if it LOOKS bad at the outset.
There is also the situation where Company A is at a disadvantage in the marketplace (i.e. behind in technology, etc.) and company B has the technology that they need to compete. 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 Forbes article below says that WD had SSD sales of around $500 million while Samsung has sales over $3 Billion in 2014. It also outlines the SSD technology companies that WD ha
buying it for less than R&D cost IS financial (Score:3)
> 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
$4B - 0.8B = $3.2B value (Score:2)
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.
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But a company rarely pays all cash to buy another company. It offers it's own stock in exchange for the stock of the other company and sometimes it's stock plus cash. This may cause some problems with dilution of the stock as more stocks are on the market but this is partially offset because the expectations for the larger company are higher (or at least should be).
There are times when you are more than willing to pay above what the market thinks a company is worth. For example if you can lock your compe
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When I sold my business the, now parent, company paid XX in cash and XXX (about 2.5x as much) in shares in the parent company. Some such law prevented me from divesting those shares for 6 months after the sale. I'm not sure if it is the same with companies which are public, mine was not.
Re:More consolidation... (Score:5, Informative)
Not entirely true.
There's the concept of a 'growth' stock versus a 'value' stock. Several tech companies (Microsoft, Apple, others) have transitioned into value stocks by starting to pay dividends, stock buybacks, etc.
Wall Street doesn't *only* care about growth. There's plenty of companies that have single-digit year-over-year gains that do very nicely.
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Wall Street still wants to see Apple and Microsoft to have good growth numbers, Apple especially. Analysts are expecting Apple to have an average annual earnings growth rate of 15% [nasdaq.com]. From the same site Microsoft is expected to grow it's earnings at just over 8%.
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And the "analysts" repeatedly do not listen to guidance from Apple, and then attempt to penalize them when Apple performs exactly as they predicted. These are the same "analysts" that predicted that the iPhone 5C should be a low-cost entry into the 'race to the bottom' that the rest of the mobile manufacturers have going on, trading margin for market share. Then, when Apple didn't do that (because they aren't concerned with growing market share at the cost of gross margin) they declare that model to be a
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Slashdot ate my source citation [appleinsider.com] on the iPhone 5C.
Re:More consolidation... (Score:4, Insightful)
The WD-Hitachi merger still isn't finalized. China hasn't given their final approval. My brother-in-law is working on this for WD and is pulling his hair out over how obtuse the China government has been.
WD has been buying SSD manufacturers for a while now. Silicon Systems in 2009, then sTec, Skyera. SanDisk is a much bigger name, but this isn't something they just started doing.
too big to flash (Score:1)
76,000 Employees? (Score:2)
What does WD do with 76,000 employees? R&D? Manufacturing? Sales? Distribution?
That just seems like a lot of employees.
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Manufacturing I imagine; they do, after all, sell a LOT of hard disks, and that's not the sort of thing you can farm out if you are a hard disk company.
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Not since all the consolidation, at least. Plus WD actually does create their own storage technologies, and thus would have to create the tools and processes to manufacture.
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There's this funny little word, that starts with "lay" and end with "offs"...
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It's manufacturing... Intel employs around 107,600 people [statista.com] to make chips, so...
Lesson Learned (Score:4, Funny)
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They also own HGST.
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WD are huge in the regular consumer market.
Nearly everyone I know buys WD for storage disks.
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What we learned today: Western Digital still exists.
Wait you didn't know? But that must mean you use Se.... DUDE backup your data NOW while you still can.
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Writing on the wall (Score:5, Interesting)
No wonder we're still waiting for a 8TB consumer drive from them. They are curbing research spending...
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Kaput? Not really, but you only use hard drives for $/TB which means you get hardly any premium for packing it denser. Also streaming is taking over from storing, people watch YouTube and Netflix (and watch&delete torrents) instead of trying to archive everything. The main consumers of hard drives are now large datacenters (and a few slashdotters) running huge RAID boxes.
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Another factor here is that the "enthusiast PC gamer", long a major consumer of large hard drives, is moving rapidly onto SSDs.
Too many recent games; Watch_Dogs, Dragon Age: Inquisition and, Far Cry 4, to name some of the most serious offenders, have suffered from in-game stutter when running from mechanical drives. The trend towards open-world gaming and higher resolution textures that's picked up speed since the introduction of the PS4 and Xbox One (which remain the main target-platforms for most games) h
Re:Writing on the wall (Score:4, Interesting)
The only people still on conventional hard drives for 'important' games are people who play Candy Crush and people who are poor college students.
LOL WUT?
New games are often 30+GB. My Steam folder is well over 1TB. I'm not buying a 2TB SSD that would probably cost more than the games did.
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So... how many of those are you actually playing at once? I got 256GB, together with Windows and a bit of other junk it's a little tight but if I just delete the "stalest" game to install a new one I still prefer it over the load times of an HDD. I tend to get addicted to a few games at the time, I never play more than a handful at once. And when I'm "done" I get fed up for a while, if I want to go down memory lane I can reinstall it quite easily later.
Wear leveling (Score:2)
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?
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Yeah, because I really want to spend hours and 30GB of my network cap downloading the game again next time I want to play it.
$5/GB overage fees (Score:2)
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.
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I would say not kaput, but you can probably see it from here.
If innovations like 3D Xpoint from Intel and other "better" flash technologies happen that improve on durability and performance while keeping prices at or below other flash tech, it sure seems to me that the rotational media market will get even thinner.
There may be some market for rotational media as a way of providing vast quantity now in very large tiered storage systems, but these kinds of systems are probably already flash tiered.
But any kin
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It's hard to say no to a 10-20% price bump when the value add is a half million IOPS and crazy throughput.
...not to mention the reduction in power usage.
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After I wrote the above post I realized I didn't factor in power.
I don't think most SMBs care about power. From my experience, the power savings for them wouldn't even be a consideration. Most might see their (usually inadequate) UPSs gain a few more minutes of run time and their air conditioning work a little better, but by and large it's not really a thing for them.
But at the very large enterprise, I'd almost bet the power savings would be worth the investment in additional floor space if they had to a
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8TB (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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I interpret their relative slowness to market as doing proper testing before releasing product.
A hard drive maker TESTING products before releasing it to the masses? You cannot be serious... If you can get the SMART testing to pass in the factory and there are enough good sectors to get you the advertised size, ship it. Time is money, especially in commodity markets like this.
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Then again, a high enough failure rate will eradicate the profit margin on your product, especially on low-margin commodity items.
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You do realise storage technology fundamentally changed above the 6TB mark right? It's less about testing the product as testing the new technology.
WD beta tester (Score:2)
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.
Anecdotes (Score:2)
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.
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Flash prices are in freefall and package density is increasing proportionally.
We're starting to reach the point where flash is out-scaling hard drives on the high end. With hard drives you run in to really hard problems to solve when you try to cram a lot of platters in to a tiny space, and then try to mass-produce the things. Moving parts are the bane of.. Well.. Everything.
With flash you simply pack on some more chips. We're already starting to see SSDs that have a higher density and larger capacity than
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No wonder we're still waiting for a 8TB consumer drive from them.
That might be enough to hold Star Citizen. I hope they can get it out in time.
Meh (Score:1)
I gave up on WD hard drives years ago... (Score:2)
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Basically all consumer HDs are from WD or Seagate now, or companies they own, so if one company's quality goes in the tank, you don't have many other options.
Hey, there's still Toshiba.
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WD's 3TB Green drives have been problematic for me. I've had about a 33% failure rate. Their other drives have been fine, with some 1TB and greater consumer drives still running after over 40,000 power-on hours.
Of course it may just be bad luck on my part with the 3TBs.
Sandisk SD cards, on the other hand, have all kinds of corruption problems with my dashcams, which went away when I replaced them with cards from another manufacturer. Hopefully WD's SSDs won't be so bad.
Can they create a worth successor to the Fuze? (Score:1)
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.