Flash memory news flash: Western Digital buys SanDisk for $16B

By Brad Jones Published May 12, 2016

western digital offices — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Western Digital has announced the completion of a $16 billion deal that will see the company acquire SanDisk. The move will help Western Digital maintain its position in the marketplace as solid state drives replace hard disks as the most popular form of storage.

“Today is a significant day in the history of Western Digital,” said the company’s CEO, Steve Milligan, in a press release distributed this morning. He went on to praise the “transformational combination” of the two companies, and also referenced the “significant cash flow” he expects the deal to bring about.

Recommended Videos

Milligan will remain the CEO of Western Digital, which will still be headquartered in Irvine, California. Sanjay Mehrotra, the co-founder and CEO of SanDisk, will be taking a position on the Western Digital board of directors.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Mehrotra commented on the deal with the observation that “growth and change go hand in hand,” and stated his optimism about the potential for success that the combination offers up.

The acquisition was finalized for a figure some $3 billion shy of the price that was reported when the deal was announced last October. This can be attributed to Unisplendour backing out of plans to purchase a 15-percent stake of Western Digital, according to a report from The Verge.

While Western Digital has long been one of the biggest names in hard disk manufacturing, in recent years this form of storage has been threatened by the falling cost of solid state drives. Given that SanDisk launched the world’s first solid state drive back in 1991, the investment should help the company remain competitive.

SanDisk may have been swallowed up, but its name will live on — Western Digital has confirmed that it will continue to use the brand to market future products.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Brad is an English-born writer currently splitting his time between Edinburgh and Pennsylvania. You can find him on Twitter…

Computing

Black Friday’s best PC hardware deal is still live, and you’re sleeping on it

The Ryzen 5 7600X sitting among thermal paste and RAM.

I'm not mad, just disappointed. A couple of weeks ago, I covered the insane deal that essentially allowed you to score a Ryzen 5 7600X -- still one of the best processors you can buy -- for just $105. At the time, I thought, surely, this will sell out in a matter of hours. Who would pass up on a deal this good? And yet, two weeks later to the day, the craziest deal I've seen during all of Black Friday and Cyber Monday is still live on Newegg.

Let me break down the deal again. You can get the Ryzen 5 7600X for $225, which is not a good price. However, you can get an additional $30 off by using promo code DLCDZ342, bringing the price down to $195. The kicker is that you also get a free Team Group MP44L 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD. That's a $90 hard drive that Newegg is just throwing in with a CPU that's already available for a decent price. The fact that the deal is still live suggests either Newegg has a ton of inventory, or not enough people know about this sale.

Computing

NZXT dismisses PC rental allegations as ‘misconceptions’ while promising changes

The NZXT H7 Flow refreshed PC case showcased at Computex 2024.

NZXT founder and CEO Johnny Hou has publicly addressed growing criticism of the company’s Flex gaming PC rental program, which faced intense scrutiny after YouTube channel Gamers Nexus exposed significant flaws in its pricing and terms. In a detailed video, Gamers Nexus described the program as exploitative, pointing out that its long-term costs far outweighed the hardware's value, leaving customers locked into a financial commitment with minimal ownership options.

“I want to acknowledge that we messed up,” Hou said in a video published by the company. He also promised to address customer concerns and improve the program but offered few specifics on what changes would be implemented.

Computing

ChatGPT’s new Pro subscription will cost you $200 per month

glasses and chatgpt

Sam Altman and team kicked off the company's "12 Days of OpenAI" event Thursday with a live stream to debut the fully functional version of its 01 reasoning model, as well as a new subscription tier called ChatGPT Pro. But to gain unlimited access to these new features and capabilities, you're going to need to shell out an exorbitant $200 per month.

The 01 model, originally codenamed Project Strawberry, was first released in September as a preview, alongside a lighter-weight o1-mini model, to ChatGPT-Plus subscribers. o1, as a reasoning model, differs from standard LLMs in that it is capable of fact-checking itself before returning its generated response to the user. This helps such models reduce their propensity to hallucinate answers but comes at the cost of a longer inference period and slower response.