I didn't know you can actually buy 1-year warranty WD's. Haven't seen any in Finland at least. Seagates are fine if you don't care about speed or noise. I need to live in the same room with my computer, so especially noise matters :|

fancy? but wont this hurt the other distributors?

so are Hitachi and Seagate going to get screwed by their new not-so-independent supplier?

interesting, i wonder if Komag supplies any other manufs that could be threatened by this move?

and synergies... a word which makes me want to punch people in the face. admittedly the word has a place and is useful in the right context, it's just a shame it got so overused by the buzz-word crowd.

Instead of buying up suppliers, maybe WD should concentrate on things like, oh, I don't know, warranty lengths perhaps. Sorry, if Seagate has a 5 year warranty and Western Digital a 1 year warranty, guess which one I'll buy. Judging from the Western Digital desktop drives that I've been using at work lately, I can see why they don't have long term confidence in their own product.

Integration of heads and media? That would be interesting to see. As florid as the rest of the statement is, how'd they miss that poor wording?

Makes me think though, how horridly expensive would it be to make a "disk drive" that doesn't spin, but basically has an entire platter of heads for each side of the media platter, with one head per bit?

I assume that's technically impossible because the heads are actually so much larger than the bits, or at least would be too cumbersome to make work, but that'd be a speedy damn drive.

So has WD all this time not actually made any of their own platters? It would seem odd that after all this time they'd suddenly decide that having that integrated with their own company would be a good idea. Or do all the drive makers farm out production of some platters, like the "mature" stuff that's relatively easy to produce? It sounds like WD may have a small division of its own (wholly-owned subsidiary) that does some production and will be merged in with Komag's work.

Might this affect quality or availability from the other brands in the short term? I'm sure there are other platter makers, but Seagate and Hitachi would have to shift production to them, and then make sure production is optimized.