It seems a bit peculiar that Western Digital acquires a company with such legacy as Hitachi, even though it’s only the storage division based in USA, but WD has clearly been more successful than Hitachi in this market.
Western Digital to snap up Hitachi GST for $4.3 billion – Electronista
We are talking complementing product suite, development and production capacity in terms of mass storage as well as gaining market share and assimilating a competitor.
Most hard drives sold today are optical 3.5” and 2.5” SATA drives, but SSD is coming strong as the technology is considerably faster, even though price/storage ratio is still very much in favor of optical.