Hello again! Back after a long weekend spent in the lovely Sunshine State.

Today, Western Digital’s $4.3 billion acquisition of Hitachi’s hard drive unit still looms large, with not one, but two links devoted to the deal. Western Digital is feeling the pressure as energy efficient flash memory eats into its consumer hard drive business — a problem since its presence in the enterprise storage market is a mere blip. That will change with Hitachi’s sizable footprint in data centers, and it’s a safe bet that cloud computing’s rise will continue to fuel demand for hard drives.

But how long before SSDs really start elbowing their way into the enterprise market? Time will tell if Western Digital making a safe bet or a $4.3B blunder.

Also, Korea’s largest electricity producer is dropping $1.8B into the smart grid by 2015; a smart grid “massive multiplayer forecasting experiment” from IEEE Spectrum and the Institute for the Future; and San Diego-based startup, Grid2Home, raises $2.6 million for its tech, which eases data brokering between smart devices and the grid.

SSDs May Have Flash But Western Digital Bets $4.3B on Disks – GigaOM

Consolidation In The Hard Drive Market As Western Digital Pays $4.3 Billion For Hitachi’s GST Unit – Forbes Blogs

Bulls jump aboard OCZ Technology – NASDAQ
Impressive revenue gains sent SSD maker OCZ’s stock soaring.

Korea Electric Power to Invest $1.8 Billion in Smart Power Grid by 2015 – Bloomberg

Podcast: Planning the Smart Grid of 2025-Today – IEEE Spectrum
Wonder what a little game can tell us about planning for our smart energy future.

Grid2Home Raises $2.6 Million To Help Smart Devices And Power Suppliers Communicate – TechCrunch

Wyoming Plays It Cool – The Wall Street Journal
Governor Matt Mead is pitching his state as the ideal spot for free-cooled data centers and he’s rolling out a red carpet made of juicy incentives for big firms.

Samsung’s New Green RAM Sips Energy, Runs Cooler in Data Centers – GreenerComputing

Datapipe Powers U.S. Data Centers with 100 Percent Renewable Energy – PR Newswire

Want a Green Data Center? Check Your Power Infrastructure – IT Business Edge