Should you find a hard drive that fits your needs at a price you can afford, consider pulling the trigger rather than putting it off until later. Reports are coming that Japan's earthquake back March is still wreaking havoc with the hard drive supply chain, and that this will continue throughout the month of May. As it stands, both Western Digital and Hitachi -- two of the top 5 HDD makers -- are operating on tight supplies.
The once cluttered hard drive market isn't so cluttered anymore. Back in 2000, Maxtor purchased Quantum's hard disk business, primarily for the company's ATA133 IDE interface. Then in 2006, Seagate scooped up Maxtor. A little more recently, Western Digital picked up Hitachi's storage division, giving WD a 50 percent share of the market. Seagate responded by snatching Samsung's HDD business as part of a "broad strategic alignment" between the two. So which company now wields the largest share of the HDD market?
Just when you though mechanical hard drives were starting to go out of style in favor of SSDs, Seagate went and did something that's drumming up a bit of excitement in the storage space. The hard drive maker broke the areal density barrier by announcing the world's first 3.5-inch HDD featuring 1TB of storage capacity per disk platter. Seagate's accomplishment should pave the way for more capacious and higher performing hard drives.
As of today it's official, Samsung is out of the hard drive business and significantly richer as a result. Samsung reportedly hoped to pull in $1.5 billion but was willing to entertain offers below $1 billion. Turns out the company didn't have to, as Seagate stepped up to the plate with a $1.375 billion offer, half of which it will pay in cash and the other half in stock. Samsung will also receive a 9.6 percent stake in Seagate, but there's more to this deal than hard drives, cash, and stock.
So long as hard drive makers continue to push the envelope with smaller form factors, there's no need to go tearing up a perfectly good pair of jeans with a bulky external hard drive. Enter Seagate, which today announced the availability of its new GoFlex Slim portable drive. This 2.5-inch HDD comes in a shell that's just 9mm thick, which is just barely more than an iPad 2 and skinnier than an iPhone 4.
Earlier this week we reported that motherboard prices could go up in the second half of 2011 due to component shortages. If that happens, it would be the second time this year that mobo prices increased. Unfortunately, the price hikes don't stop there. Now we're learning that hard drives could cost more as the year goes on, too.
Seagate this morning announced a slew of new enterprise storage solutions, covering all the bases in the process. These include two new members to Seagate's performance-oriented Pulsar solid state drive (SSD) family, two next generation Savvio 15K and 10K hard drives, and a high capacity Constellation ES.2 3TB HDD.
Western Digital, the world's second largest maker of hard drives, announced on Monday it has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase Hitachi's HDD division. Under terms of the deal, Western Digital will fork over $3.5 billion in cash and 25 million WD common shares valued at $750 million to purchase its rival. Hitachi will then own about 10 percent of Western Digital, as well as add two members to WD's board of directors.
Seagate's pitching its new 3TB Barracuda XT hard drive as an easy-cheesy way to add oodles of storage to your system, even if you're rocking a legacy OS like Windows XP. Same holds true for anyone saddled with a non-UEFI BIOS, which at this stage is pretty much everyone. So how exactly does Seagate slip past the 2.1TB barrier that would normally throw a wrench into such setups? Answer's after the jump.
Western Digital and Seagate have been jockeying for the top spot in the global hard drive market, and the two swapped places in 2010. According to data provided by The Information Network, Seagate's market share dipped from 31.2 percent in 2009 to 29.9 percent in 2010, while Western Digital went from 29.6 percent to 31.4 percent in the same time frame. Hit the jump to find out how WD managed to leapfrog Seagate, and how the rest of the HDD market is shaping up.
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