ST. LOUIS, December 8, 2004 – On Tuesday, IBM announced the sale of its personal computing business unit to Chinese manufacturer Lenovo Group Ltd. Lenovo, formerly called Legend, will purchase the IBM unit for $1.75 billion, a move that will also switch the employer of almost 10,000 IBM employees.
One significant factor in IBM’s decision to sell the personal computing unit was a reported increase in warranty expenses between January 2003 and June 2004. An unusually high rate of problematic components is most likely the culprit for this increase. Nathan Wright of ESS Data Recovery (www.essdatarecovery.com) suggests that hard drive failure may have contributed to these expenses.
“We see a fair amount of hard drives that come from IBM units, both desktops and laptops. I wouldn’t say we get more IBM or Hitachi drives than other brands, though. Fortunately for IBM’s customers, the drives that come out of their computers tend to have higher data recovery success rates.”
IBM’s use of the IBM Travelstar and Deskstar ended in June of 2003 with the sale of IBM’s hard drive division to Hitachi Global Storage. IBM has continued to use the Hitachi Ultrastar, Deskstar, and Travelstar in its servers, desktop computers, and laptops since the sale.
Hitachi and Lenovo established a partnership in June of 2004 to develop storage solutions and services, primarily for the Chinese IT market. Wright says to expect more of the same when Lenovo picks up manufacturing of the former IBM personal computers.
“I would expect Lenovo to continue using Hitachi hard drives. If modifying our data recovery techiniques becomes necessary, we will make the changes.”
Contact Datarecovery.com at 1.800.237.4200 for more information.
