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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Bloomberg reports [bloomberg.com] that hard disk drive maker Western Digital (WD) is considering purchasing SanDisk Corp. [theregister.co.uk] for between $80 and $90 a share, or around $17-18 billion.

A merger would give WD access to SanDisk's NAND flash chip foundry deal with Toshiba and make WD an instant competitor in the solid-state drive market. As we reported last week [soylentnews.org], SanDisk is also partnering with Hewlett-Packard on Storage-Class Memory (SCM), a post-NAND competitor to Intel and Micron's 3D XPoint offering [soylentnews.org].

After three years of delay, Chinese trade regulator MOFCOM has approved WD's integration with HGST [theregister.co.uk]. The two businesses will be required to keep product brands and sales teams separate for two more years, but can begin "combining operations and sharing technology," such as HGST's helium-filled 7-platter hard drives. $400 million in annual operating expenses could be reduced by the integration.

WD can be expected to include helium-filled hard drives in its product lineup imminently. If WD merges with SanDisk, we may also see the inclusion of more large NAND flash caches in the form of hybrid hard drive [wikipedia.org] (HHD/SSHD) products. The Xbox One Elite Bundle ships with a 1 terabyte SSHD [extremetech.com], and Seagate recently released a 4 terabyte desktop SSHD [storagereview.com].

It's not all good news for Western Digital this week. Security researchers have just disclosed [seclists.org] multiple vulnerabilities in WD's "My Passport" and "My Book" self-encrypting hard drives that allow encryption to be bypassed [theregister.co.uk].

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