According to the most recent rumors, three giant tech companies are currently secretly in talks to partner in an even larger and more powerful joint venture. The players are Hitachi, Fujitsu and Toshiba (which seems to still has faith in joint ventures’ benefits despite the recent defeat its camp suffered in the high def format war). However, the hard drive market is currently thriving and Hitachi, Fujitsu and Toshiba represent three of the largest storage technology companies of the world. Why not partnering and join forces?

Recently, Hitachi GST failed to sell a major portion of its company to Silver Lake, after the American company claimed majority control of the company it was to acquire.

According to tech analysts, if these three companies joined forces, they would be even able to challenge Seagate Technology in terms of both market share and technology leadership.

At the moment, however, any of the three companies isn’t too prosperous on the hard drive market. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Hitachi’s storage division, has never reported profitability after it had been acquired from IBM a few years ago. On the other hand, Fujitsu and Toshiba focus mainly on HDDs for small form-factor and mobile applications, an area where their products face serious competition in the form of flash-based storage solutions.

Still Hitachi, Toshiba and Fujitsu are three of the largest storage technology companies and the recently rumored plan might turn to be successful for all of them some time in the future.