This could be both good and bad, depending on your views of spinning discs, as HD makers still need to compete with SSD, unless they have tremendously failed so badly at increasing aerial density, they are giving up and joining in...

If WD buys Sandisk, I assume Seagate will look to acquire someone else in the SSD space...

I assume over time they are losing drive sales due to SSD drives replacing small RAID drives, but also offset by Cloud and Big data storage requirements (everybody needs to store selfies of themselves next to monuments, several billion people against thousands of monuments... do the odds)

I have managed to store and migrate data over 3 decades from spinning disc to disc, and despite 3 data losses, have the data preserved, still on hard disks...

Ever since WD and Seagate have been the Big 2 post-flood, the HD market has completely stagnated...

I never thought I'd be stuck with so many 7200rpm 3TB drives waiting for a real improvement to come along to consumer products, though I do have several 4TB external drives...

Where are our "Moore's Law" 20GB Hard Drives?

Official now:

Oct. 21, 2015 — Western Digital® Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC) and SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Western Digital will acquire all of the outstanding shares of SanDisk for a combination of cash and stock. The offer values SanDisk common stock at $86.50 per share or a total equity value of approximately $19 billion, using a five-day volume weighted average price ending on October 20, 2015 of $79.60 per share of Western Digital common stock. If the previously announced investment in Western Digital by Unisplendour Corporation Limited closes prior to this acquisition, Western Digital will pay $85.10 per share in cash and 0.0176 shares of Western Digital common stock per share of SanDisk common stock; and if the Unisplendour transaction has not closed or has been terminated, $67.50 in cash and 0.2387 shares of Western Digital common stock per share of SanDisk common stock. The transaction has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies.

http://www.wdc.com/en/company/pressroom/releases/?release=e5f16023-3969-4cd0-bc3b-fe7e35572518

@NickBen

Where are our "Moore's Law" 20GB Hard Drives?

do you mean:

20TB Hard Drives? If so I thought that SSD was only just getting started. Its scary enough having spinning disks hold 6TB. Also prices of SSD are falling like a brick currently! Thank goodness!

As for Mores Law, I don't think it stipulates which 'part' of the computing system will get faster, smaller and cheeper.

Think of the old vacuum tubes: they didn't make them smaller, something completely different had to come along.

Currently you can get much better speed out of even an old computer by simply placing OS onto SSD. It was known for many many years that HDD speed was keeping back computer speed, not GHZ. Thats why everything now is about getting data as fast as possible to the CPU. Which is even more important for video pros with such large datasets. (Even compressed data- such as H264/5 needs to be decompressed for manipulation at some stage in the pipeline) which is why you get better performance from using uncompressed footage as opposed to heavily compressed footage (regardless of decompression instruction set- less is less).

Besides, the whole propaganda regarding Moores law slowing is simply to justify low-end machines, which 90% of people use for Facebook anyway.

But personally I think it would be better for someone to come out with more reliable storage. SSD looks like its a good start.

A few reports on SSD & HDD reliability, nothing we didn't already know:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/ssd-reliability-in-the-real-world-googles-experience

Data storage is an on-going issue. Specifically since we are generating ever more data. Solution currently is one giant mess of Blu-Ray, DVD, CD, Tape, HDD, SSD.

In the short term SSD is obviously the way forward from spinning media. Whatever that indicates.