Western Digital takes a mega-bite, swallows Hitachi GST

WASDted 1 588 Views

In an ’s Global Storage Technologies division for roughly $4.3 billion. With this acquisition, WD, an industry leader in consumer and entertainment-class storage solutions that recently ventured into the solid-state drive market, no-doubt aims to become a major player in the enterprise storage market. Steve Miligan, president and CEO of Hitachi GST said "Together we can provide customers worldwide with the industry's most compelling and diverse set of products and services, from innovative personal storage to solid state drives for the enterprise," Mr. Miligan will join WD as president, reporting to John Coyne, CEO of WD.

Today’s announcement has sent [index up over 2%]. Western Digital (WDC) traded up over 15% today while other drive makers like Seagate Technology (STX) enjoyed gains close to 10%. Another winner today is OCZ Technology Group (OCZ) which closed the day up 15% but not due to WD’s announcement, rather because it beat fourth-quarter 2010 estimates and recorded $64 million in revenue. That is a gain of 100% over the previous year.

No doubt storage is getting smarter, faster and now leaner with one less company competing.

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Dani AI

Generated

provided the original announcement and useful context; a few practical implications and troubleshooting tips follow for storage admins and buyers.

On 's question about SSD-HDD hybrids: there are two distinct approaches commonly called "hybrid" — single-drive SSHDs (NAND cache integrated into the drive) and tiered/cached storage at the controller/array level. Enterprise deployments more often use controller-level caching or tiering (SSD read/write caches, automated tiers) because they scale and are easier to validate. Single-drive hybrids trade simplicity for limited, workload-dependent gains. Any product-level convergence from the two companies will require firmware and controller integration, so immediate mass-market hybrid rollouts should not be assumed.

Practical checklist for environments that include Hitachi or WD drives:

  • Capture inventory: model, serial, firmware and OEM part numbers.
  • Verify warranty/RMA coverage and whether spare-part policies change after vendor consolidation.
  • Test rebuild and resync times with mixed families before putting drives into production arrays.
  • Prefer identical-model sets for RAID; if mixing is necessary, bench and monitor rebuilds and I/O under load.

Useful commands to collect drive identity and firmware:

smartctl -i /dev/sdX
hdparm -I /dev/sdX
smartctl -a /dev/sdX | egrep -i 'model|firmware|serial'

Notes and cautions: expect SKU rationalization and eventual product-family alignment after any merger, which can affect long-term spares and firmware updates. Contract and asset managers should track any change in support channels and keep current backups and tested replacement plans rather than relying on a single vendor's roadmap.

Member Avatar for Fortinbra
Fortinbra 37 Posting Whiz in Training

Does this mean we may be seeing more SSD-HDD hybrids on the market?

Member Avatar for WASDted
WASDted 184 Practically a Master Poster

I doubt it.

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