Samsung is reportedly considering the sale of its money-losing hard disk drive division for up to $1.5 billion. According to an April 18 report from the Wall Street Journal, the company hopes to use the sales to raise cash for investment in a new growth area. Samsung had an 11 percent share of the global hard disk drive market as of last year, and potential candidates would likely be Western Digital or Seagate. The latter commands 29 percent of the market, and was the world's largest HDD maker until it was leapfrogged by Western Digital. Western Digital in March agreed to acquire Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in a deal that made it the world's largest hard disk drive maker with about 48 percent market share.

As reported by EE Times, hard dive shipments were expected to achieve 160.9 million units in the first quarter of 2011, down from 167.5 million in Q4 last year. The expected dip comes as no surprise considering how the HDD industry has been under pressure by the influx of tablets devices and smartphones that rely on solid-state NAND memory chips for storage as opposed to bulkier magnetic disks.

Update: Seagate has agreed to acquire Samsung's HDD business

For more on this story:
- check out this article at eWeek
- check out this article at EE Times
- check out this article at Wall Street Journal

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