"Western Digital has secured conditional approval from the European Union's competition regulator to purchase Hitachi's hard disk drive business for $4.3 billion, after it agreed to sell several production operations."

At the behest of equipment manufacturers looking to build a new class of ultra-thin notebooks, Hitachi GST announced today it will begin shipping quarter-inch thick hard drives -- 26% slimmer than the current drives in most laptops and netbooks today.

The storage capacity of modern harddrives is starting to get pretty decent, but as we've learn through the years you can never have enough storage space and current 2TB harddrive will soon be replaced by even more spacious models.