Seagate Technology and Toshiba are reportedly competing to acquire TDK's hard disk drive magnetic head business in a transaction valued at several billion dollars, reports Bloomberg. For Seagate, the acquisition would expand the supply of HDD heads that it also produces internally, but for Toshiba, TDK is the only way for it to get magnetic heads for its hard drives. If Seagate buys TDK's HDD heads operation, then Toshiba's HDD business will depend on supply from Seagate.

TDK is the world's only independent supplier of HDD magnetic heads and Toshiba's sole source of the components. By contrast, Seagate and Western Digital manufacture heads internally and also buy them from TDK if they need to. In recent years, TDK started to produce HDD heads for Seagate's drives that rely on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, Western Digital's products featuring energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR), and Toshiba's HDDs based on microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) technology, which makes it an important supplier for all hard drive manufacturers.

Yet, while Seagate and Western Digital produce magnetic heads internally, they also source them from TDK when they need additional supply to respond to increases in demand. Toshiba, by contrast, depends entirely on TDK for these components. Access to TDK's technology is particularly important for Toshiba as while the company's next-generation 30TB-class HDDs are expected to rely on MAS MAMR technology, their successors will rely on HAMR. Meanwhile, developing write and read heads for HAMR is particularly hard and time-consuming, which makes TDK a key enabler for Toshiba's HDD business both for existing products (for which the company probably has long-term supply agreements) and future generations of hard drives that only exist in the roadmap.

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