This is the single company that manufactures both: HDDs and NAND memory

May 23, 2012 14:41 GMT  ·  By

Japanese technology giant Toshiba has officially declared it would start shipping hybrid drives in September 2012.

Just after selling its own Thailand-based hard disk factory, the company started bragging about doubling its HDD market share.

Right now, with Fujitsu’s old HDD division combined, Toshiba only manages less than 9% of the global hard disk drive market.

Up until the Western Digital 3.5” equipment and IP (intellectual property) deal, Toshiba was only manufacturing 2.5” laptop hard drives. They weren’t even able to cover the whole hard drive market.

Now that they’ve sold their Thailand HDD plant, we’re pretty sure their global hard disk drive “takeover” plan will move just a tad slower.

On the other hand, in the notebook area, the tech giant is a well-known and respected HDD supplier.

Many of the company’s hard disk drives are also known to be snail-slow. Adding flash is an absolute necessity when we talk about the performance of their laptop hard drives.

Toshiba also plans to become one of the “top three” computer hard drive manufacturers. We agree, but we wonder who else is there besides Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba?

By 2015, the company vows to increase its market share and promises it would concentrate on high value products rather than on volume.

Hybrid drives will certainly be better performing than normal hard drives, so the manufacturer’s goal to work more on higher-priced products is set up on the same path, but what kind of prices are we to expect from the Japanese giant?

As most of you know, Japanese products are usually more expensive than their Western counterparts. Therefore, hoping for a little competition (price wise) in the hard disk drive market is depressing, as it’s very likely that there will be none whatsoever.