Western Digital is ready to buy Toshiba's chip manufacturing business

[Greg S]

As part of its $19 billion purchase of SanDisk, Western Digital inherited a partnership with Toshiba for NAND memory production. With Toshiba sitting as the second largest producer of NAND chips, Western Digital is now interested in acquiring a large stake - or perhaps all of - Toshiba's semiconductor business.

Through a consortium deal reported by Reuters, Western Digital and the Innovation Network of Japan could offer up to $17.4 billion to purchase the entirety of Toshiba's chip business. Following a string of losses from the bankruptcy of Westinghouse (Toshiba's nuclear energy division in the United States), a sale of the chip division could remove uncertainty for stockholders over the future of the company.

Toshiba's originally preferred bidders were funds backed by the Japanese government, SK Hynix and US private equity firm Bain Capital LP.

Western Digital has argued that its consent must be obtained before a sale can happen, a stance that has appeared to give the company a competitive advantage in talks in recent weeks.

An official sale could be several months away from closing. Toshiba's fiscal year ends in March and is viewed as a critical deadline. If a sale is not made to cover losses, Toshiba could risk being removed from the Tokyo Stock Exchange due to its inability to cover existing debts.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/70959-western-digital-ready-buy-toshiba-chip-manufacturing-business.html

 

[yRaz]

Never trusted Toshiba hard drives. I usually go Intel for SSD's and Western Digital blacks for HDD's. Hopefully WD will turn around the reliability problems I've had with Toshiba drives.

 

[Evernessince]

Never trusted Toshiba hard drives. I usually go Intel for SSD's and Western Digital blacks for HDD's. Hopefully WD will turn around the reliability problems I've had with Toshiba drives.

Toshiba makes pretty reliable drives

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/backblaze-cloud-storage-numbers-2016/

I've got a few of them in one of my rigs. That said, there is a noticeable difference between them and WD Blacks. The Toshiba 6TB x300 drives I have definitely park more often and the lag is noticeable when it has to spin up again.

 

[yRaz]

Toshiba makes pretty reliable drives

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/backblaze-cloud-storage-numbers-2016/

I've got a few of them in one of my rigs. That said, there is a noticeable difference between them and WD Blacks. The Toshiba 6TB x300 drives I have definitely park more often and the lag is noticeable when it has to spin up again.

my experience has been Seagate and Toshiba drives failing on me. I've never had a WD fail on me. That said, I know people who have numerous WD drives fail on them and they swear by either Seagate or Toshiba. I guess it's the luck of the draw, but I'll stick with WD black drives. I also decommission drives after 3-4 years. I don't format or get rid of them "just in case." I guess it's the number of computers I have, but I've had too many hard drive failures. Out of all the component problems I've had over the years, several have been hard drives and one was a powersupply. That's not including all the hardware I've broken through overclocking....

 

[cliffordcooley]

I guess it's the luck of the draw

That about sums it up.

 

[Evernessince]

my experience has been Seagate and Toshiba drives failing on me. I've never had a WD fail on me. That said, I know people who have numerous WD drives fail on them and they swear by either Seagate or Toshiba. I guess it's the luck of the draw, but I'll stick with WD black drives. I also decommission drives after 3-4 years. I don't format or get rid of them "just in case." I guess it's the number of computers I have, but I've had too many hard drive failures. Out of all the component problems I've had over the years, several have been hard drives and one was a powersupply. That's not including all the hardware I've broken through overclocking....

I was in the same boat. Had a bunch of random hard drive failures. It completely stopped though when I started torture testing my drives before putting them into service. I would simply fill a hard drive up with files, wipe it, and repeat again. Doing this on a 6TB HDD takes about 2 days but it will find any mechanical or disk surface issues. I've saved myself from 3 bad drives doing this. Hard Drives don't know bad sectors until it tries to write data to them. Going through the above procedure forces them to do just that and is also a real world test of the drive's longevity and performance.

The WD Black 4TB were the fastest HDD I had doing 211 MB/s. The Toshiba X300 6TB gets about 186 MB/s. I hear the WD Black 6TBs are even faster

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

Never trusted Toshiba hard drives. I usually go Intel for SSD's and Western Digital blacks for HDD's. Hopefully WD will turn around the reliability problems I've had with Toshiba drives.

When it comes to HDD's, Toshiba has a pretty solid reputation. It's just the luck of the draw, just as with everything else you buy.

 

[erickmendes]

The great take away here is that one big company is going to control NAND production, if I may got it right...

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Through a consortium deal reported by Reuters, Western Digital and the Innovation Network of Japan could offer up to $17.4 billion to purchase the entirety of Toshiba's chip business. Following a string of losses from the bankruptcy of Westinghouse (Toshiba's nuclear energy division in the United States), a sale of the chip division could remove uncertainty for stockholders over the future of the company.

See, his is why I dont like the stock market. The NAND sector makes money, so you are going to sell it?
Selling the unprofitable portions would be a far better financial move.

The great take away here is that one big company is going to control NAND production, if I may got it right...

Not quite. You have sammy, toshiba, WD, and crucial making NAND right now. WD wants to expand by buying up toshiba's business. We'd still have three manufacturers.