HGST, formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, part of WD as of 2012. The cool thing about them was that their consumer Deskstars were at least as reliable as enterprise disks by other manufacturers. I still have 12-year-old PCs here with HGST 80 and 160 GB drives that were subject to daily use and a lot of inappropriate handling. The Deskstars don't mind.
Very unfortunately, HGST has apparently scaled back Deskstar sales and development significantly since the acquisition. I guess it has to do with WD selling off some of HGST's 3.5" assets to Toshiba in order to appease competition authorities. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10057519
"In May 2012, WD divested to Toshiba assets that enabled Toshiba to manufacture and sell 3.5-inch hard drives for the desktop and consumer electronics markets to address the requirements of regulatory agencies."
Added link to an older comment of mine that addresses the HGST/Toshiba thing. To me, it looks like newer Toshiba 3.5" models are based on Fujitsu tech (if the enclosure design is any indication). Also, Toshiba might abandon their HDD business completely. [1]
Fujitsu :( I worked at Fujitsu wholesale distributor around 1999, EVERY SINGLE drive sold between 1999-2001 died within 3 years (PB15/PB16). Those were great drives, cheap, silent, fast, and smelled great fresh from the factory due to pine sap rosin.
Allegedly Cirrus Logic controller had a manufacturing defect and died due to heat. Myself I always suspected that very peculiar and strong smelling rosin flux. PCB was drenched in it, this type of flux is usually highly activated and requires cleaning, otherwise acid will eat solder joints and copper away, especially in humid and hot environments.
I had one fail, got a replacement, and with the replacement and its replacements continued that cycle until a new generation of drives came out, at which point I sold the stupid thing on eBay. It was unreal.
Of course, the reality is China wanted a piece of WD, and used the merger as leverage to get it. I would expect by 2017, HGST drives are just as shit as WD. Which is unfortunate, because the Japanese designed one hell of a hard drive.
Thank you for sharing this! I actually was naive enough to believe that WD would continue to let HGST operate as a seperate entity.
There is probably some good news in the article though, for what it's worth: "At that time John Cyne ran WD. He since retired, with HGST bss Steve Milligan taking on his job." ... "In other news Western Digital has announced a new executive management team, and it looks almost like HGST executed a reverse take-over of Western Digital." ... "A person who was close to the corporate action in Western Digital and HGST said: 'All key positions are with HGST people; it's a reverse buyout. First HGST took Coyne's money to buy themselves (probably with a clause that Milligan is becoming CEO) and then they watched WD dismantling itself.'"
The 400GB Hitachi Deskstar in my old old Dell Desktop (Dimension 9100) so think early 2005, was still going strong before the power supply in that desktop died in 2013 or so. It had about 20 bad sectors according to SMART, but it still was chugging along.
Quantum was the premiere maker of SCSI drives back in the day. They were beating IBM and IBM needed more capacity so IBM bought them. Then IBM sold to Hitachi, who sold the drive business to Western Digital who sold the drive business to Toshiba.
I believe these Deskstar types and derivatives are the same essential mechanism and processes as those old quantum drives (probably especially in terms of the QA processes). The heads and the technology have improved to give better capacity of course, but I've been buying and relying on these drives for ~25 years at this point.
I'm not surprised to see them showing up well on these charts.
Not quite the full picture. And there's bad news: Newer Toshiba desktop drives look more like the server stuff that they have been manufacturing since acquiring Fujitsu's HDD business. Plus, Toshiba might give up the HDD business entirely. [1]
Seems like WD effect appeared on their 8TB drives :-/ My NAS has 5x 4TB HGST I bought due to previous Backblaze reports and am waiting to figure out which 8TB drives should I buy - Seagate Archive had really bad real-world usage reviews and now HGST seems to be slipping as well :-(
If you look at the number of drives and the length of time they've had the drives, you quickly realize that you need to take it with a grain of salt. They even state in the article they don't have enough data to come to any conclusion on those drives.
Also, the fact that backblaze are publishing most of their data online is very cool.