Seagate completes Samsung HDD acquisition

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Seagate has closed a deal to acquire Samsung's hard disk drive (HDD) division, at a time when an HDD shortage is causing chaos.

The deal will see Seagate gain both Samsung's HDD products, including the M8 line of 2.5-inch HDDs, as well as a range of employees from South Korea.

Seagate plans to have those workers "focus on development of small form-factor products for the mobile compute market."

The deal was announced back in April, as the two sought to expand on their partnership, which sees Seagate supply disk drives for Samsung consumer products, whilst the South Korean firm provides chips for the US firm's solid state drives (SSDs), amongst other devices.

"Together, Seagate and Samsung have aligned our current and future product development efforts and roadmaps in order to accelerate time-to-market efficiency for new products and position us to better address the increasing demands for storage," said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and CEO.

"It is an exciting time in the industry with rapidly evolving opportunities in many markets including mobile computing, cloud computing, and solid state storage."

The partners also extended their patent cross-licensing deal and will seek to expand their cooperative work on enterprise storage products.

"The strategic relationship will open new opportunities for the two companies by mutually complementing each other's creative technology solutions for a broad diversity of IT applications," said Oh-Hyun Kwon, vice chairman of device solutions of Samsung.

The value of the agreements came to $1.4 billion (£896 million), Seagate added.

The deal closed at a time when the effects of the Thai floods have caused carnage in the disk drive market. With supply down, prices have risen and PC shipments are expected to go down.

Intel this month warned HDD supply shortages would hurt its current quarter revenue.

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