I hope WD buys them. Makes great SSDs. Lots of SSDs. The most SSDs. For the love of Jibbers someone start making more SSDs!
I'm sick of this supply problem.
Toshiba says it will sell off its memory semiconductor business as it looks to recuperate from the write-off of losses to its nuclear power business. The Japanese electronics giant said on Friday that it wants to flog its flash chips and SSD divisions of its storage and electronic devices solutions company by March 31 of this …
New fab capacity is happening, but there is only so much capacity to build new litho and semicon processing machinery. (I work in this industry). On top of that building a fab is an investment of several billion dollars. Not an easy step to make in todays climate and few companies have the financial clout to pull it off. It's certainly not possible for just anyone to go to the bank and get a billion dollar loan to start up a semicon fab.
Just don't expect any warranties to be honoured 3 years from now on any new Toshiba drives bought. I don't think they will around.
Arranging a warranty return for Samsung HDDs on the Seagate site (who bought that biz) was a real pain (wouldn't recognise serials), remember that at least.
Toshiba's desktop hard disk business seems to be getting wound down, leaving just Seagate and WD. We used to only source Hitachi, who made one type of 3.5" drive and made it well. Switched to Toshiba and WD Reds. 2 Reds have already failed. Toshiba (ex Hitachi designs) are still going strong, as are the Hitachi drives still. The 7200rpm Toshiba 3.5" run surprisingly cool and quiet.
I just don't trust WD or Seagate much, but beggars can't be choosers.
The warranty return process with WD is pretty good though, with one exception, (for a Global company the size of WD) you can't pre-authorise with a credit card that has a 3 digit starting with a zero. i.e. 091 (it gets read from the form field as "91"), which doesn't bode well for the security of how they store your card details, if they can't do the basics.