Another HD maker to go.....

Heliospherez · 17 Feb 2009 at 20:18

Announced that Toshiba is buying out Fujitsu's Hard drive arm - the combined company will have approx 30% market share of Hard drive business. Seagate has about 35%.

So effectively we have moved from 6 manufacturers to only 5 now. Originally this was around 200.

Possibly a good thing as Toshiba can now work more on SSD and can use existing Fujitsu technology. But it may have a negative effect on the pricing with less competition.

BYTEr · 17 Feb 2009 at 21:36

This is completely off-topic but I've noticed that all the SSD's currently on sale on OcUK are from manufacturers who as far as I'm aware at least in the last couple of years weren't involved with mechanical hard-drives? Seems all the memory manufacturers (understandably) are getting in on the business, but isn't SSD perceived as the future of hard-drives? then surely the current mechanical hard-drive manufacturers like Western Digital, Seagate etc are gonna have to start to get on the SSD bandwagon or their go out of business?

Monkeynut · 17 Feb 2009 at 22:40

I suspect this will happen more as HDD manufacturers try to keep themselves afloat.

John24 · 17 Feb 2009 at 23:13

Toshiba have alread invested heavily in Mtron SSD`s and now this, seems their on a mission.

Talrinys · 18 Feb 2009 at 06:45

Monkeynut said:
I suspect this will happen more as HDD manufacturers try to keep themselves afloat.

It will, but there are still a couple of years until this really happens, if one or two companies can own the whole mechanical harddrive market until then, that is an extreme amount of money.

rpstewart · 18 Feb 2009 at 09:48

The SSD technology is still in its infancy so long term reliability hasn't been fully understood. Until that happens the enterprise market (where the big bucks are) won't embrace SSDs in any great numbers so there's still plenty of money to be made in mechanical disks.

GrantJ · 18 Feb 2009 at 10:46

Can't say I am going to miss fujitsu, since I've never used any of their drives, AFAIK

Laptops would derive the most benefit from the shock and vibrational resistance of SSDs., and I would really like a notebook that I can actually use in a taxi while travelling without the fear of head crashes. Now if only these SSD manufacturers get their act together and start producing SSDs that really deliver, we could be in for good times..

Talrinys · 18 Feb 2009 at 11:24

rpstewart said:
The SSD technology is still in its infancy so long term reliability hasn't been fully understood. Until that happens the enterprise market (where the big bucks are) won't embrace SSDs in any great numbers so there's still plenty of money to be made in mechanical disks.

That depends if the speed is a lot better, you can always ensure yourself, if you have to buy twice the amount of disks for redundancy but one SSD is equal to 4 HDD's in terms of performance, that'll still be a lot cheaper.

ChrisLX200 · 18 Feb 2009 at 11:28

My first SCSI disk was a Fujitsu, a huge 1GB capacity drive with 8 platters. Found it recently and pulled it apart, it was built like a brick ***house. They made some good stuff.

Celador · 18 Feb 2009 at 12:00

Don't forget the biggest boon for using SSDs in laptops is that being solid state, they have no moving parts and therefore need much less power and so the batteries last a lot longer. Also, with no moving parts, heat in the laptop cases is reduced... good times.

The corporate market won't buy into them until these performance factors have been demonstrated... not surprising given their price tags!!!