Hitachi in moves to create HDD empire

After Fujitsu's snivelling recalls from a few years back I'm surprised they stayed in the biz. The Hitachi's I've installed seem to still be working, and my personal true-blue IBM Deathstar is still whirring away six years later (which is three years longer than the vaunted genuine Quantum Fireball that went paws up the same week as the warranty expired). But, anything Hitachi wants to do gets a frightened thumbs-up from me. They've been my favourite multinational for twenty-five years. Now that I've learned that they're in the Bluefin Tuna biz, operating factory ships, to go along with MRI machines, earth moving equipment, personal grooming products, and of course their vaunted Tokomak reactor (1:1 any minute now, boss, seriously!), tying up the hdd biz seems on par. If US corporations had taken some real diversification lessons from the 'Tach (copyright pending), GM would be stomping Tokyo like Gojira on Anguirus. Seriously, though, Toshiba sells hdd's?

... Hitachi will go bankrupt along with Toshiba in a few years... 

Hitachi, Toshiba and Fujitsu made HDD's?? :) Funny

This sounds like a magic tale of three little dwarfs trying to play basketball in NBA by standing on eachother's shoulders to compensate for the individual height deficiency:) All the easier for Seagate and WD to topple them, I say.

They all should realize that their days are numbered and should try to sell off the HDD divisions ASAP while they still can. Flash is coming to town much quicker than even I was expecting.

... at least. Seagate recently announced up to 300TB+ HDUs in a 3-4 years time. Even if they are going to release them in the next 4-6 years starting with maybe 2.5TB, 5TB and 10TB HDUs for 2009 replacing current 500GB ,750GB an 1000GB models.. then there is no way flash SSD units could ever match them both for price and speed. Flash memory is still too slow compared to current HDUs already and a few new products featuring top notch flash memory which is fast enough are so expensive that no one would invest money on them unless SSD is needed for some specific uses that HDUs could get damaged quicker. 

but its mainly because of that deskstar lines of harddisks that also harmed ibms reputation and forced them to floog the HDD business off.
at least they got some very reliable hdd series later then, but most ppl didn't notice that either and bought seagate or samsung.

IBM had built the first harddisks, they have invented every basic mechanism used in todays harddisks. hitachi continued to have some technological advantages due to the developer teams which they took partly over from IBM.
They are not far behind in disksizes, do even begtter that giant seagate there and they perform best by a considerable margin in acess time (latency) at a given drivespeed (7200rpm) of course a raptor maybe slightly better with is 10k rpm, but hitachis are the fastes 7,2k drives, at least in acess times. 
now they need to bundle that with fujitsus expertise in low power and noise and toshibas smart chaches and predictions and they could have a winner. but all three need to get higher capacities per disk. they may not be behind seagate currently, but samsung is definitely oin the edge with its 334gb per platter F1 series. this gives speed improvements without having to change everything else too much cause denser disks mean more readable bits per rpm.

but what hitachi needs most is a new fancy name and branding, something that sounds like quality and can collect better reputation than the original hitachi brand. they should really consider rebranding everything but maybe also with soemthing similar to what seagate did with its 5 years warranty (which is not for bulk editions which are most of the sold drives). but topping that to 6 years would definitely help to make the name widespread and wellknown, even if ppl only buy the identical 3 years warranty bulk-edition. they still think they buy something with considerably higher quality then and thets what hitachi needs besides performance to gain marketshare in the channel.

Shouldn't that be the _merging_ of a magnetic media mega monster? A mighty manufacturer, moreover?

Toshitachitsu FTW!

Toshiba has a revenue of 63 billion dollars, and has its mitts in many many areas, and is not about to go broke, get a clue.
Additionally Toshiba Semiconductors is the number 4 largest semiconductor maker, behind Intel, Samsung and Texas Instruments, but before STMicroelectronics.

Featuring
SW as Seagate-WD, and
HFT as Hitachi-Fujitsu-Toshiba

... that i didn't know Hitachi drives were so "unpopular". I myself only buy hitachi's drives... for me, my friends, and all other computers i build. Seagates are too slow , and WD's are to noisy and unreliable in my expirience.