Are HGST drives now discontinued?

Ihaveworms

Ihaveworms

Ukfay Ancerkay
Joined
Jul 25, 2006
Messages
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I know that Western Digital had bought HGST a few years back, but there were still HGST branded drives being manufactured and sold. My NAS is getting a little full, so I did a search for HGST and all the links just return to Western Digital. Are HGST drives no longer being made?
 
Well, you can still buy hgst nas drives for now (until stock is depleted.) WD is also keeping the ultrastar alive, just rebranding it as WD Ultrastar. Looks like they are also dropping helium filled sata on drives smaller then 14TB.
 
I found the same recently, no new HGST drives and that is all I buy.
So I bought an He10 drive from Ebay for a very good price, I'm golden for years now.

DTR ranges from 230 to 120MB/s, great storage drive.
It remains cooler than any drive I have used, even when transferring large amounts of data, and its very quiet.
The last HGST NAS drive I bought was hotter and louder than anything previous so this is pleasant.

He10 are not good drives for data that changes a lot as they write to adjacent tracks as well as those you intend to write which can result in slower writes when the drive gets full.
Mine is over half full and is fine so far.
It fulfils my main criteria of holding my data safe for a long time and is very quick to access.
Recommended if you dont intend putting an OS on it.
 
Gold is also gone...I think the WD Gold 10TB and above drives where HGST anyway and they have posted a table on their site with the replacements which are again the same drives under the new naming scheme.
 
Sad news to see HGST no longer producing drives. I know WD owns 'em now and will continue to make drives but there's something about those Hitachi drives - they are to this day, and the IBM drives that preceded them - the only hard drives that have never ever failed for me, not one of them. Seagate, at least for me, is the next reliable brand as I've only had 2 of those die (my own personal drives). WD? Forget it, never owned one (of dozens and dozens of them usually found in hardware I purchase) that didn't fail right when I didn't need it to happen.

Sad to see HGST disappear, truly sad. :(
 
Tiberian said:
Sad news to see HGST no longer producing drives. I know WD owns 'em now and will continue to make drives but there's something about those Hitachi drives - they are to this day, and the IBM drives that preceded them - the only hard drives that have never ever failed for me, not one of them. Seagate, at least for me, is the next reliable brand as I've only had 2 of those die (my own personal drives). WD? Forget it, never owned one (of dozens and dozens of them usually found in hardware I purchase) that didn't fail right when I didn't need it to happen.

Sad to see HGST disappear, truly sad. :(
Click to expand...

Well that is why statistic on drive failure are not a Bible....the only drives that have ever failed on me whenever I didn't want them to were Seagates - I am full of WD drives (even Greens) and they have been running for years without failures....I had IBMs fail on me too.

BTW as I said the WD Golds 10TB and up were HGSTs with Helium.
 
That sucks. HGST are/were the superior drive, hands down, for home NAS. My drive of choice for 10 years now.
I can only hope WD took the HGST manufacturing and rolled it into their own behind the scenes.
I really do not want a large NAS built out of WD Reds. Probably over 100 HGST NAS drives used over years without a single failure here. Not a one, knock on wood.
 
I tempted the devil it seems, my 6TB installs drive took a dive last night, the partition vanished.
Only noticed it today after realising a problem I had last night must have been down to this, the OS was running fine. The partition disappeared while the OS was still live.
It happened after moving a ton of data off it and some back on. Perhaps Windows or the driver got its knickers in a twist and didnt complete a task correctly.

Its now running partition find and mount to locate the partition so I can copy off the data and reformat to start from scratch.
My first partition loss on a HGST drive!

edit
Its really shafted.
Partition find and mount doesnt see the partition.
Testdisk finds the partition but says it is corrupt and wont write the partition data.
So far only Easeus can access it. It can see everything I am missing, I may have to buy it.

Is there any free software that can pull data from a borked inaccessible 5TB partion?
Though I copied a load of stuff last night so my job is trickier locating everything.
It was backed up a few weeks ago so isnt a total loss if the data is corrupt.
 
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So sad, nothing against WD drives but currently my server is populated with HGST and HGST only HD's. I have an older Kingston or some other SSD as the boot drive but storage, I was set with HGST. Guess I'm going back to WD as my drive of choice...
 
IIRC WD bought the HGST name and their 2.5" business, the 3.5" side got sold to Toshiba.
 
the 3.5" side got sold to Toshiba.
Click to expand...

Toshiba got some IP for existing 3.5 inch drives at the time of the sale but WDC developed and produced 3.5 inch HGST drives for a couple of years. They have recently removed the HGST branding.
 
Tiberian said:
they are to this day, and the IBM drives that preceded them - the only hard drives that have never ever failed for me, not one of them. /QUOTE]

I've never had any hard disks bought as new fail, except for:
  • The 2nd new HD I ever bought, an IBM 6.4 GB from Computer City, would spin but not be recognized.
  • My external 400GB WD notebook drive developed an intermittent problem with its USB-SATA adapter.
  • My 1TB Hitachi 7K1000.C acted funny because the screws holding the circuit board to the drive vibrated loose over many years. After retightening, it's been rock solid.
Most of my drives have been Seagates, none from the 7200.11 series.
Click to expand...
 
Well, count me as one of the unlucky ones that got a bad out of the box Hitachi 6TB NAS drive in a retail kit. I have been using Hitachi SATA 7200 drives for at least 10 years now. My current system setup is a boot SSD (Samsung), and two Hitachi HDDs. 4 TB for music and photos, and 6 TB for my Retrospect backup. Each year, I change out the backup drive, so I have backup drives going back to about 2010. Those are only 2 TB. My backup needs exploded once I got seriously into digital photography, with 25 MB RAW files. As an old slide shooter, digital photography is "free" so sometimes I "spray and pray." No problem with multi-TB Hitachi drives. Until now.

I just got a 6 TB Hitachi drive for my 2019 backup and, son-of-a-gun it won't format. Windows Admin tools and MiniTool Partition Wizard both report that it is a .5 MB drive, MBR. And neither application can delete that .5 MB partition, or convert to GPT or format to 6 TB. The label on the drive said that it was built May, 2018. So today of all days I had to RMA this drive back to the Egg. Geez, the web page doesn't even show the link to fill out an RMA, so I had to do that over the phone. I was on hold for like 45 minutes. :eek: The nice agent offered to send me a replacement, except that Newegg is out of stock on this drive. So I'm getting a refund.:)

Fortunately i found an Amazon reseller who seems reputable, where Amazon does the fulfillment. So for 2019 at least, I still can use Hitachi. But starting in 2020 I will need a different brand. :( I know it won't be Seagate. So am I stuck with getting a WD drive? Is Toshiba a viable alternative?
 
x509 said:
Well, count me as one of the unlucky ones that got a bad out of the box Hitachi 6TB NAS drive in a retail kit. I have been using Hitachi SATA 7200 drives for at least 10 years now. My current system setup is a boot SSD (Samsung), and two Hitachi HDDs. 4 TB for music and photos, and 6 TB for my Retrospect backup. Each year, I change out the backup drive, so I have backup drives going back to about 2010. Those are only 2 TB. My backup needs exploded once I got seriously into digital photography, with 25 MB RAW files. As an old slide shooter, digital photography is "free" so sometimes I "spray and pray." No problem with multi-TB Hitachi drives. Until now.

I just got a 6 TB Hitachi drive for my 2019 backup and, son-of-a-gun it won't format. Windows Admin tools and MiniTool Partition Wizard both report that it is a .5 MB drive, MBR. And neither application can delete that .5 MB partition, or convert to GPT or format to 6 TB. The label on the drive said that it was built May, 2018. So today of all days I had to RMA this drive back to the Egg. Geez, the web page doesn't even show the link to fill out an RMA, so I had to do that over the phone. I was on hold for like 45 minutes. :eek: The nice agent offered to send me a replacement, except that Newegg is out of stock on this drive. So I'm getting a refund.:)

Fortunately i found an Amazon reseller who seems reputable, where Amazon does the fulfillment. So for 2019 at least, I still can use Hitachi. But starting in 2020 I will need a different brand. :( I know it won't be Seagate. So am I stuck with getting a WD drive? Is Toshiba a viable alternative?
Click to expand...
I switched to Toshiba a few years ago. So far so good.
 
capt_cope said:
I switched to Toshiba a few years ago. So far so good.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I had to go to the Toshiba website to learn that they have drives larger than 3 TB, their X300 series. I already ordered (from A*****) a HGST 6 TB drive, but for next year, it will probably be Toshiba. My only hesitation is that BackBlaze has only a small sample of Toshiba drives in their 2018 drive reliability report, but it's still nice to see 0 failures. Frankly I'm surprised that they have so many Seagate drives. You think they would learn from experience.
 
JargonGR said:
Gold is also gone...I think the WD Gold 10TB and above drives where HGST anyway and they have posted a table on their site with the replacements which are again the same drives under the new naming scheme.
Click to expand...
If you come across that again and can post it, that's be appreciated :)
 
x509 said:
Thanks. I had to go to the Toshiba website to learn that they have drives larger than 3 TB, their X300 series. I already ordered (from A*****) a HGST 6 TB drive, but for next year, it will probably be Toshiba. My only hesitation is that BackBlaze has only a small sample of Toshiba drives in their 2018 drive reliability report, but it's still nice to see 0 failures. Frankly I'm surprised that they have so many Seagate drives. You think they would learn from experience.
Click to expand...

Its good that Toshiba drives have a high reliability because as from reports here and elsewhere, their warranty service sucks.
 
Basically HGST stopped being produced as a separate brand in late 2017/early 2018.

The drives are still highly available. But they cap out at 10TB.

From here on forward, all drives produced by WD will be branded WD.

Toshi(t)ba got some HD patents out of the deal too. But I've never been impressed with Toshi(t)ba drives or any of their products.
Add in their customer-hostile support, and I see no reason to throw money at them unless every other drive manufacturer on the planet and all their product disappeared tomorrow.
 
Chas said:
Basically HGST stopped being produced as a separate brand in late 2017/early 2018.

The drives are still highly available. But they cap out at 10TB.

From here on forward, all drives produced by WD will be branded WD.

Toshi(t)ba got some HD patents out of the deal too. But I've never been impressed with Toshi(t)ba drives or any of their products.
Add in their customer-hostile support, and I see no reason to throw money at them unless every other drive manufacturer on the planet and all their product disappeared tomorrow.
Click to expand...
And on the flip-side, I've been burned bad by Seagate (10 out of 12 Baracuda ES drives died over the course of two-ish years. It will take years of people singing their praises before I stop lumping them with maxtor in my mind) and I've never been impressed with WD products in the past. Only had a handful of WD drives fail, but enough that I've tried to avoid them for the better part of a decade. Given the current options - WD, Toshiba, or Seagate... I'll take Toshiba until I have a reason not to.
Customer service is a non-starter for me. Unless it's doa (and then I'd return it to the retailer) I'm not willing to jump through any hoops for one or two replacement drives. By the time the number of failed drives gets to the point that I would jump through hoops... I won't be interested in storing any data on those drives anyways.
 
capt_cope said:
And on the flip-side, I've been burned bad by Seagate (10 out of 12 Baracuda ES drives died over the course of two-ish years. It will take years of people singing their praises before I stop lumping them with maxtor in my mind) and I've never been impressed with WD products in the past. Only had a handful of WD drives fail, but enough that I've tried to avoid them for the better part of a decade. Given the current options - WD, Toshiba, or Seagate... I'll take Toshiba until I have a reason not to.
Customer service is a non-starter for me. Unless it's doa (and then I'd return it to the retailer) I'm not willing to jump through any hoops for one or two replacement drives. By the time the number of failed drives gets to the point that I would jump through hoops... I won't be interested in storing any data on those drives anyways.
Click to expand...
So it's the devil's choice. Toshiba as the "least bad" option. I have to say that when I did need customer service from HGST it was always very good. Another reason to miss them.
 
I've never had any problems with WDC drives. I mean ANY.
And I've had performance and stability issues with Toshiba drives (to say nothing about their computer systems).
So, I guess you do you and I'll do me...
 
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