Seagate Technology is to acquire Samsung Electronics  loss-plagued hard disk drive (HDD) business for $1.4 billion as it looks to battle rival Western Digital Corp and curb price wars that continue to damage the industry.

The deal comes a month after Western Digital sought to buy Hitachi Ltd’s hard disk drive division for $4.3 billion, to create a global leader with deep resources.

It is yet to be seen whether Western Digital trump Seagate as the world’s largest hard drive maker after the deals conclude. In 2010, Seagate’s sales was $11.4 billion while Western Digital posted revenue of $9.85 billion.

Toshiba Corp and Fujitsu are the other smaller players in the hard-drive space.

The sale of the HDD business will see Samsung leave the cut-rate industry and focus on its bread-and-butter memory-chip business.

The sector is already battling persistent sales-growth declines and now faces a longer-term threat from wireless tablet devices using more power-efficient flash drives, or solid-state drives (SSD).

Seagate and Western Digital have been struggling to adapt to a future where fewer consumers tote laptops and many view flash drives as the future of the disk drive industry.

They are increasingly being built into laptop PCs and tablet computers such as Apple’s iPad and the HDD giants are also looking to enter the flash drive arena.

After the deal, Samsung will supply NAND-type flash chips to Seagate for use in its SSD products and it will source HDD from Seagate for its PCs, laptops and consumer-electronics products.

The deal will also help Seagate to gain access to Samsung’s customer base across China and Southeast Asia.

Samsung will receive 45.2 million Seagate shares worth $687.5 million, or about 9.6 percent of the company, and the rest will be paid in cash. With the deal, Samsung will become the second-largest shareholder of Seagate.