Western Digital has announced plans to acquire Solid State Disk manufacturer sTec, Inc. for $340 million in cash. sTec will be merged into the Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) division. The merger was unanimously agreed upon by sTec’s board of directors and now sits in the hands of stockholders. The deal is expected to go through in the third or fourth quarter of 2013. 

A Brief History of WD

Storage media giant Western Digital has been a leader in storage technology virtually since its inception. Although the company experienced a slump in the 1990s, the new century brought new success to the global leader. 

In 2001, Western Digital introduced high performance mainstream ATA hard disk drives, with 8MB of cache vs. 2MB of disk buffer available in other models available at the time. Performance of WD products ramped up again in 2003, when the company offered the first 10,000 rpm Serial ATA hard disk drives, with an average access time of less than 6 milliseconds. Western Digital products became widely recognized and acclaimed for inexpensive enterprise and home storage servers. 

More Western Digital Milestones 

Along with groundbreaking product development, strategic acquisitions have long been a part of Western Digital’s success. 

– In 2007, WD acquired magnetic media manufacturer Komag

–  In 2009, Western Digital broke data storage capacity limits, being the first to ship a 2TB internal hard disk drive.

– Also in 2009, Western Digital entered the Solid State Drive market by acquiring Siliconsystems, Inc. 

– In 2010, WD developed the first 3TB internal HDD.

– In 2012, Western Digital acquired HGST to become the world’s largest hard disk drive manufacturer

The acquisition of sTEC will cement Western Digital’s place in the future of storage media, paving the way for the hard disk manufacturer to also lead the field in development and manufacturing of solid state drives and other high-tech storage products. 

24 Hour Data and Western Digital: On the Cutting Edge

24 Hour Data’s hard disk drive recovery specialists have always stayed on top of data recovery techniques for Western Digital hard disk drives. As storage capacities increase, effective data recovery methods become crucial for Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, organizations and even families, storing mission critical data on hard disk drives and RAID drives. 

As WD takes the next step in its evolution, 24 Hour Data’s data recovery research and development teams will be right there to perfect our data recovery methods for the newest lines of hard disk and solid state disk drives from the industry leader.