...Western Digital has announced that it has purchased (http://www.hitachigst.com/press-room/2011/western-digital-to-acquire-hitachi-global-storage-technologies) Hitachi's storage division. The deal is scheduled to be completed some time in Q3 2011. The deal will also see Hitachi gain a minority holding stake in WD.

I hope that WD doesn't try to handicap the Hitachi Deskstar and Ultrastar drives with WD's permanently-TLER-disabled firmware...

Great...just great.

I really liked the Hitachi drives; never had a problem with them....unlike WD drives. At least for me, I have had 3 WD drives fail me....so one less alternate HDD vendor to go to is a bummer.

I guess time to go stock up on Hitachi ASAP!!

Samsung's F series seems to be doing me quite well...so far.

Thanks for posting Randall!!

most likely to happen is Hitachi drives will no longer exist (other than maybe the enterprise drives)
funny i remember the IBM deathstars (hitachi is formally IBM)

TLER issue ONLY applies to parity raid
it does not apply to raid 0,1 10..
for those doing parity raid you should be using the enterprise drives regardless of who makes them...

WD fail rate is no different from anyone else either.. yes i know personal experiance may tell you different
but from a reseller POV trust me they all have about a 3% fail rate (over 3 yrs)

Scott
ADK

that is unfortunate; i have not had any decent luck with WD drives. Actually i had better luck with Seagate 7200.11 1TB drives (the notorious Seagates that would just suddenly expire) versus WD's (green, black, and blue). Not even in RAID, just bad sectors all of a sudden.

I've had one WD recently go belly-up on me - I can't remember the specific error, but my computer suddenly can't even detect the drive. Apparently a not-so-uncommon problem with WD drives. Almost 500 GB of data permanently lost. It's why I now have two RAID-1 arrays.

I too am sorry to see an alternative manufacturer disappear.

J.