14 DAY TRIAL // As far as rumors on the IT market go, some are more wild than others, but a recent one involving Samsung may actually have something to it, considering how things have been going on the storage industry.
Samsung is a company that deals in a wide variety of products and technologies, mobile, CE (consumer electronics) and PC-related alike.
Hard disk drives are one of these business outlets, but it is implied that this will soon change.
Due to sales of HDDs falling in the wake of an increasing preference for NAND Flash-based storage devices, the outfit has supposedly decided to sell its HDD business.
Until Flash memory really took off, mostly every consumer electronics utilized (mini) hard disk drives for the majority of storage purposes.
Then, when NAND chips began to get really capacious and fast, things changed, especially due to how quick Apple was to promote the new solutions through its products.
With SSDs getting better and cheaper, and with memory cards and the like also gaining huge storage capacities, HDD sales have fallen a great deal.
As such, Samsung has been making less and less profits from selling platter-based storage solutions, until it started to incur losses.
This situation was also enabled by how Western Digital bought Hitachi some time ago, leading to a world-class giant with many resources.
Provided the report is true, the outfit wants to get $1.5 billion in exchange for its entire HDD business, though $1 billion may suffice as well.
So far, the buyer said to be most likely to take the HDD business of Samsung's hands is Seagate, as it would allow it to reduce the now large gap between it and WD, though it won't match the latter's $4.3 billion worth of fresh resources and market share.
Unfortunately, and not unexpectedly, neither of the two companies offered any comment on this report.