@balazer: Yes, I confused who-bought-whom. But the consequence is still scary: Only three manufacturers of magnetic disks left. Let's hope we won't need magnetic disks anymore than this number goes down to one...

What about Toshiba, don't they still manufacture HDDs?

Toshiba manufactures hard drives, but their only 3.5" manufacturing is using technology acquired from Hitachi & Western Digital, which was a condition of Western Digital's acquisition of Hitachi's hard drive unit. The 3.5" market is owned 85% or 90% by Western Digital and Seagate. I don't think Toshiba can be regarded as a serious competitor.

Some interesting reading: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Enjoying-Market-Manipulation-Western-Digital-Posts-Huge-Profits-Again-Part-1-283193.shtml

@jam

While article has it's points it clearly not objective. As I mainly understand Seagate was furious about such results, can be source of complains. Another source is that HDD companies are afraid about "server" drives marketing efforts, so they constantly repeat in article that load is inappropriate, you need high cost server drives only.

They painted company as doing things wrong. While usage of cheap high capacity consumer drives is normal for storage farms.

Soon computers/tablets will be little more than terminals with almost all our data stored in the cloud.

Do not worry, this go in waves. :-) As speed increases people stop thinking clearly and stop understanding real life complexity and reliability of such things.

@pundid:

Very useful, and revealing

Great post! Thanks for the info, guys!

New update

I have five of the Toshibas, had one fail. I guess that's 20 percent. OTOH, they are fast, quiet and cheap. Those Seagate 4TB drives, yikes, big losers, even with a small number of drives.