WD: Thai flooding should speed EU decision on Hitachi

WD believes the flooding in Thailand puts greater impetus on the European Competition Commission to green-light its proposed acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. The acquisition of Samsung's HDD biz by Seagate was cleared by competition regulators this week as they were notified of the deal by the vendor a day …

[MacRat]

Duopoly

Would you like your computer to come with hard drive A or B?

Nothing is better for consumers like lack of competition.

[{¯`·.¸_Là Mߤ¥_¸.·´¯}]

3 players if all gets approved

how can you have a duopoly with seagate wd and toshiba?

[SpottedCow]

Only in some markets...

There is only a duopoly on the notebook side.

How many 3.5" desktop drives, or server drives, have you seen manufactured by Toshiba?

[SpottedCow]

Correction...

I meant, there is only "not" a duopoly (apologies to grammar Nazi's for the double negative).

[BristolBachelor]

I agree that this should be considered.

Imagine in the future if the combined operation decides it's much cheaper to only have ONE factory, and then there is a fire / flood / earthquake, etc. in that location. Yes how much better for the consumers!

[unitron]

Who needs competition anyway?

Lately (according to my admittedly quite non-infinite sample set), it seems WD has been making more reliable drives than Seagate, but Samsung has seemed more reliable than Hitachi (proudly carrying on the Deathstar tradition), so this seems a good way to achieve a more uniform level of mediocrity.

Has someone already bought up Toshiba's drive division?

Couldn't decide on appropriate icon, so didn't choose one, but still want the old set back.

[Alan Brown]

There already is One factory....

All the makers are reliant upon Xyratex for critical parts at the moment. There is already a single critical point of failure loomng behind the curtain.