Hitachi GTS Acquired by Western Digital for $4.3 Billion

Every now and then in the computer world we actually do hear about things that do not involve Apple or anything Apple related. It is rare, yes, but it does happen. One such instance is that Western Digital, a company known for their hard drives, has officially bought out Hitachi GST for a pretty $4.3 billion.

That's right, on Monday Western Digital told media outlets that they were buying Hitachi Global Storage Technologies for the equivalent of $4.3 billion. There were different things that comprised the entire deal which included a combination of $3.5 billion in cash with the addition of shares in the total amount of $50 million. Full terms of the deal included Western Digital's name remaining the same for the company and Hitachi GST CEO Steve Milligan joining Western Digital as President.

CEO of Western Digital John Coyne argued to media sources that the move was primarily for scale. Western Digital and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies would form a larger competitor company and would also have the advantage of better research as well as a wider range of products as Hitachi has focused primarily on fields like drivers for set-top boxes and a greater focus on mobile hard drives.

This move is an attempt by Western Digital to hedge their position and compete against a market that gets increasingly tougher each day. Hitachi has suffered with reduced influence whereas Western Digital has been battling it out with fellow American rival company Seagate. Western Digital's acquisition of Hitachi GST gives the company a improved position in the competition.

Source: Electronista - Western Digital to snap up Hitachi GTS for $4.3 billion

The Security Camera Blog



Get a regular infusion of new security camera technology information, video and news. Easy to subscribe in a reader or by email.

We help you stay in touch with the latest security camera features.

Read More >>

Seagate Demos 6Gbs Hard-Drive Transfer Speed

It looks like Seagate and AMD are already planning for the future for SATA drives by showing off their first tech demo of Serial ATA Revision 3.0. That is pretty much a fancy name for SATA 3. The new SATA 3 cables will feature a new transfer rate of six gigabits per second (589.09 MB/s) which is double to the speed of the current generation SATA 2 cables (288.55 MB/s).

Before you get excited though you should know that this will not double the transfer rate of data for your hard drive. Currently no Hard Drive, even the SSDs, have broke the SATA 2 288.55 MB/s data transfer cab, but some are getting close, the Intel X-25M is currently the highest at 250MB/s.

So why bother you may ask, Seagate commented by saying that usually the SATA cable technology always improves a couple of years in advance of the Hard Drives. Also the new spec also includes greater support for streaming operations in its Native Command Queue, so you can do streaming reads/writes without grinding all the rest of your operations to a halt. Even better news is the SATA 3 cables will be fully compatible with all SATA 2 products and will be out by the end of the year.

Read More >>

1.5-terabyte External Hard Drive for $112.49 shipped

Wow, seriously 1.5 terabytes. This is enough storage to hold your entire music, movie, and picture collection on and you should still have a ton left over. If you are in dire need for storage this is the deal for you. Dell has just gave out a coupon code that allows you to buy a Seagate External FreeAgent external drive that is holds 1.5 terabytes for the low cost of $112.49 and free shipping.

The coupon code is T4346M$Q6GRJB$, just enter it at the checkout and it is good up until April 4th.

The External Drive is just a simple 7200 RPM USB 2.0 drive. It does not have eSATA, but Seagate backs the drive with an impressive 5 year warranty. their is some bad news though, the FreeAgent is said to be only compatibly with Windows XP and later models of Microsoft's OS, so that means bad news for you guys using a Mac or Linux. Also there has been an Average Review rating of around 3-3.5 on Newegg and Amazon so I would recommend reading the reviews before buying.

The fact is though you are getting a Giant 1.5 terabyte drive at the low cost of 7.5 cents a gig.

Read More >>