Fujitsu hard drives are now Toshiba's, win for solid-state storage.
Well, it’s official – Toshiba is scraping up the remains of Fujitsu’s hard drive business for an undisclosed amount. As previously reported, we’re lead to believe this will make Toshiba the world’s largest notebook hard drive supplier.
In recent times, Fujitsu’s hard drive division has only served to be a massive money sink. As a result, it’s been shopping around, looking for someone it deemed suitable to buy the whole hog. Fujitsu previously shrugged off Western Digital’s attempts to buy the business, as it reportedly couldn’t promise to keep all the staff on board. One can only assume Toshiba won’t be whipping out its boom stick any time soon.
After an initial transferral period, Fujitsu will hand over the entire gig to Toshiba, including hard drive design, development, manufacturing, and sales. Everything, that is, aside from its “head and media businesses.” These two will go to industrial materials manufacturer, Showa Denko [PDF].
The heads are one of the most expensive components in a hard drive, and are the sensitive parts that read and write data via the magnetic properties on the surface of the spinning disks, or platters. ‘Media’ refers to the material that forms the platters. Server hard drives use the tried and true aluminium variety, while the newer glass-based platters are more commonly seen in typical notebook drives, as glass is far more durable when it comes to sudden movement while rotating.
When we first heard that Toshiba was interested in purchasing Fujitsu’s storage division, we were a tad confused. Not only is the 2.5-inch hard drive market fast moving toward solid-state as the preferred medium, this is an area that Fujitsu wasn’t touching, as it only manufactures mechanical hard drives. In fact, Fujitsu was promoting many of its notebooks with Samsung solid-state drives in them (which wouldn’t have helped with the poor performance of its dwindling hard drive division).
This move does make a lot of sense, though. From an enterprise perspective, Fujitsu is a leader in this market and Toshiba barely has a foot in there. The purchase of this hard drive business was an ideal way to collect these customers, kicking the door wide open to big businesses now exposed to Toshiba’s solid-state drives. Although Toshiba has an enterprise solid-state drive, Intel and STEC are both very much the current leaders. This may soon change.
This is fantastic for us regular folk, as it means more enterprise competition, which, in turn, means solid-state drives will fall in price much quicker.
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