Western Digital Corp , the world's No. 2 hard drive maker, agreed to buy Hitachi Ltd's hard disk drive operations for about $4.3 billion in cash and stock, in a bid to leapfrog market leader Seagate Technology Plc . Western Digital will pay $3.5 billion in cash and $750 million in stock for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, the companies said. The hard drive market has been hurt by weakening growth in PC-related sales as tablet computers and other new devices not equipped with hard disk drives surge in popularity.
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