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    Western Digital and Toshiba trade hard drive tech, clearing the way for WD / Hitachi merger

    Western Digital and Toshiba trade hard drive tech, clearing the way for WD / Hitachi merger

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    Western Digital and Toshiba have agreed to trade parts of their respective businesses by March 2012, leaving Toshiba with equipment and intellectual property to build 3.5-inch hard disks, and Western Digital with a shuttered 2.5-inch plant in Thailand and the divestiture it needed for approval to merge with Hitachi.

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    WD hard drive 500GB stock 640
    WD hard drive 500GB stock 640

    Today, Western Digital just agreed to give Toshiba the equipment and intellectual property required to build consumer-grade 3.5-inch hard drives, but Toshiba won't be paying in cash. In exchange, the Japanese storage company will give Western Digital a 2.5-inch HDD facility that's been shut down since the Thailand flood disaster late last year. It sounds like a crazy deal, until you remember what's at stake: Western Digital needed to divest part of its 3.5-inch hard drive business in order to satisfy the European Union's conditions for a merger with Hitachi this year.

    Since Seagate already bought Samsung's hard drive business, the thought process went, a WD / Hitachi merger would leave the hard drive industry with only two major players in the consumer hard drive space, unless WD could be weakened appropriately. Now, Western Digital may have what it takes to merge with Hitachi at last, and we can all look forward to the repercussions until Toshiba takes up the slack. Both companies expect the deal to be approved next month.