4 ms·

A LOT happened in the ~2011 -> ~2013 timeframe, including the largest consolidation in hard drive manufacturing history (outside of maybe ~1992). Toshiba acqui

A LOT happened in the ~2011 -> ~2013 timeframe, including the largest consolidation in hard drive manufacturing history (outside of maybe ~1992). Toshiba acquired Fujitsu's HDD business in 2010. Seagate acquired Samsung's HDD business in 2011 (remember they acquired Maxtor in 2006 as well). Western Digital acquired the HGST group in 2012 (makers of the best damned 2TiB drive I've ever seen in my life) You're left with 3 hard drive manufacturers, of which two are major SSD vendors for enterprise. This reduction to 3 vendors has a lot more to do with pricing than almost anything related to consumers's HDD purchases (who's growth since 2010 is something like 8%, it'd be better to invest in S&P 500 then run an entire consumer hard drive business)

pmoriarty 9y ago
How many people were buying Fujitsu, Samsung and HGST drives before the acquisitions? My impression was that most people were buying Seagate and WD drives for a long time, and the rest were bit players. So I'm not sure how much the aquisition actually changed in the market. It effectively wasn't very competitive to begin with. Much like the CPU market, where Intel and AMD are the only two big players. Or the desktop operating system market, divided mainly between Microsoft and Apple.
- jrnichols 9y ago
  > How many people were buying Fujitsu, Samsung and HGST drives before the acquisitions? People? Not sure. But I was seeing a ton of Fujitsu and HGST drives in Dell and Apple stuff.
- codemac 9y ago
  > How many people were buying Fujitsu, Samsung and HGST drives before the acquisitions? Many many many. But the purchasers weren't consumers or even businesses, but other storage vendors higher up the value chain (see: emc, netapp, etc).