-
Ask a question and get free supportUnlock new privileges and see hidden discussionsWin prizes and earn reputation
-
Question of the day ~ Do you queue to fill up your car before the fuel price increase every month?
-
Afristay giveaway.Win a 2-night stay for two people at an establishment of your choice with R1,000 in spending money. Enter here.
Sign up with GoogleWhere Can I Buy a Hitachi Hard Drive?
- Thread starter hyperian
- Start date
-
- Tags
- hard drive hitachi
Did you read the article about the hard drive life spans?
I have a suspicion he did!
FuLL_MeT4L
Expert Member
- Joined
- Oct 25, 2004
- Messages
- 1,230
Article clearly stated that Hitachi's HDD side were bought by Toshiba and WD though.
well, then he should have noted that Hitachi (3.5") got bought by Toshiba
I did indeed read the article and I'm aware of all these things 
I thought that there were still Hitachi-branded drives out there.
I've had 1 and 1.5tb Western Digital Green drives for around 3 years and they're still ticking over. Are the Toshiba's the Hitachi drives that the article refers to?
I thought that there were still Hitachi-branded drives out there.I've had 1 and 1.5tb Western Digital Green drives for around 3 years and they're still ticking over. Are the Toshiba's the Hitachi drives that the article refers to?
Chevron
Serial breaker of phones
- Joined
- Oct 2, 2007
- Messages
- 25,900
I did indeed read the article and I'm aware of all these things
I've had 1 and 1.5tb Western Digital Green drives for around 3 years and they're still ticking over. Are the Toshiba's the Hitachi drives that the article refers to?
With regards to desktop drives yes.
Laptop drives got sold to WD.
Space_Chief
Honorary Master
- Joined
- Aug 22, 2012
- Messages
- 12,950
I imported all of mine or bought them overseas. Macsales uses Hitachi drives in their RAID products. Ebay is also a source. Problem is the poor exchange rate.
ponder
Honorary Master
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2005
- Messages
- 92,881
WD owns HGST (Hitachi). Just because one study found a limited range of HDDs to be more reliable than others, I wouldn't put any more trust in them. We get just as many Hitachi notebook drives in for recovery as any other (and the success rate is lower). Hitachi drives are mainly OEM, not really on the retail market. If you by portable externals, like ADATAs, you'll often find Hitachi drives inside them.
So we might as well stick to Seagate then?
Rickster
EVGA Fanatic
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2012
- Messages
- 20,459
I have 5 Seagates and they are all at 100% health. My oldest SG is over 3.5 Years old.
So i think that study is not accurate, and have you seen how close they pack the drives? And they are vertically positioned.
Is having a drive standing vertical bad in you opinion?
Buy Hitachi drives? Do you really want to? They might have the name, but are they the same? Do they still have the IBM DNA? I dunno ...
IBM DNA, you ask?
There's a history, which might briefly amuse those with an idle Wednesday moment.
As you know, IBM invented the moving-head direct access magnetic storage device we know today as the HDD. The RAMAC 350 was released in 1956, and stored just under 4MB, a massive amount of data at the time (a larger drive was cancelled because the market for it was too small).
In the early 70s, IBM released a new storage system that didn't require the heads to be unloaded from the media. This project was codenamed Winchester and had two 30MB modules in a 30/30 config. The codename was inspired by the Winchester 30/30 rifle - and the name stuck until the end of the millennium. For years, PC HDDs were called Winchester drives.
During the 70s and 80s, IBM faced a marathon 17-year anti-trust lawsuit aimed at breaking up the company - it was bigger than the next nine IT companies combined - and this seriously defocussed management. And so the Great Change began, a tumble from the top.
Now, IBM kit was universally recognised as the pinnacle of engineering and manufacturing excellence. Fortune's Most Admired for nearly a decade in a row. By 1984, it had reached $84b in sales, and immense profits. IBM spent more on R&D than the total revenues of the next biggest IT company, to give just one benchmark of its dominance. "No-one was ever fired for buying IBM" said many a hapless competitor salesman. Everyone in IT wore blue suits, except ICL and Hitachi salesmen.
It was mostly EDP, then DP, and storage was called DASD and DASF. Heavy metal. With midrange coming on strong following DEC's lead. Then came the IBM PC in 1983, and the Personal System/2 with OS/2 announced in 1987.
In the late 80s IBM released the world's first 3.5" drive with 1GB capacity, called the UltraStar, for its Personal System/2 (PS/2) desktops and servers. Incidentally, I personally delivered a pre-GA SCSI model to a large bank. Their special price was just under R13K in then's money, at least R150K in today's!
The IBM PC reigned supreme, but its open PC architecture was soon cloned, and with the aid of Microsoft, the Clone Wars raged. For various reasons too complex to discuss here, IBM lost the battle and decided to get out of the PC business altogether. It shut down its Personal Systems Division and sold its ThinkPad laptop business to Lenovo.
The IBM Microelectronics Division that made HDDs was scaled back and switched to supplying others as an OEM, using the name DeskStar. The original UltraStar HDDs were of outstanding quality and reliability, but the new cost-reduced DeskStars had a notoriously high failure rate, and were dubbed "DeathStars". Some users even sued IBM in a class action lawsuit.
Though the DeskStar manufacturing problems were fixed by the turn of the century, this unpleasant experience prompted IBM to get out of the small HDD business altogether, and it sold the business lock, stock and manufacturing plants, to Hitachi in 2002, forming HGST. Hitachi continued to sell the IBM DeskStar under its new name. It was a leader in capacity and also MTBF specs, introducing the first 400GB, 500GB and eventually 1TB (2006) HDDs. The old IBM UltraStar name was resurrected for their data centre/enterprise drives, so the name has come full circle.
In 2012 Hitachi sold its HGST division to Western Digital. The deal allowed WD to keep the Hitachi name, as well as the DeskStar and UltraStar brands, though I see on their website the once fashionable bicapitalisation has been dropped.
I still have my original IBM and Hitachi drives. They chugged away for years, but now lie in a pile of disks too small to use.
Here's a pile of drives on a desk, snapped a few minutes ago. I pulled in a few dead WDs just for fun.
-- -
Oh, I think Esquire still sell Hitachi HDDs...?
IBM DNA, you ask?
There's a history, which might briefly amuse those with an idle Wednesday moment.
As you know, IBM invented the moving-head direct access magnetic storage device we know today as the HDD. The RAMAC 350 was released in 1956, and stored just under 4MB, a massive amount of data at the time (a larger drive was cancelled because the market for it was too small).
In the early 70s, IBM released a new storage system that didn't require the heads to be unloaded from the media. This project was codenamed Winchester and had two 30MB modules in a 30/30 config. The codename was inspired by the Winchester 30/30 rifle - and the name stuck until the end of the millennium. For years, PC HDDs were called Winchester drives.
During the 70s and 80s, IBM faced a marathon 17-year anti-trust lawsuit aimed at breaking up the company - it was bigger than the next nine IT companies combined - and this seriously defocussed management. And so the Great Change began, a tumble from the top.
Now, IBM kit was universally recognised as the pinnacle of engineering and manufacturing excellence. Fortune's Most Admired for nearly a decade in a row. By 1984, it had reached $84b in sales, and immense profits. IBM spent more on R&D than the total revenues of the next biggest IT company, to give just one benchmark of its dominance. "No-one was ever fired for buying IBM" said many a hapless competitor salesman. Everyone in IT wore blue suits, except ICL and Hitachi salesmen.
It was mostly EDP, then DP, and storage was called DASD and DASF. Heavy metal. With midrange coming on strong following DEC's lead. Then came the IBM PC in 1983, and the Personal System/2 with OS/2 announced in 1987.
In the late 80s IBM released the world's first 3.5" drive with 1GB capacity, called the UltraStar, for its Personal System/2 (PS/2) desktops and servers. Incidentally, I personally delivered a pre-GA SCSI model to a large bank. Their special price was just under R13K in then's money, at least R150K in today's!
The IBM PC reigned supreme, but its open PC architecture was soon cloned, and with the aid of Microsoft, the Clone Wars raged. For various reasons too complex to discuss here, IBM lost the battle and decided to get out of the PC business altogether. It shut down its Personal Systems Division and sold its ThinkPad laptop business to Lenovo.
The IBM Microelectronics Division that made HDDs was scaled back and switched to supplying others as an OEM, using the name DeskStar. The original UltraStar HDDs were of outstanding quality and reliability, but the new cost-reduced DeskStars had a notoriously high failure rate, and were dubbed "DeathStars". Some users even sued IBM in a class action lawsuit.
Though the DeskStar manufacturing problems were fixed by the turn of the century, this unpleasant experience prompted IBM to get out of the small HDD business altogether, and it sold the business lock, stock and manufacturing plants, to Hitachi in 2002, forming HGST. Hitachi continued to sell the IBM DeskStar under its new name. It was a leader in capacity and also MTBF specs, introducing the first 400GB, 500GB and eventually 1TB (2006) HDDs. The old IBM UltraStar name was resurrected for their data centre/enterprise drives, so the name has come full circle.
In 2012 Hitachi sold its HGST division to Western Digital. The deal allowed WD to keep the Hitachi name, as well as the DeskStar and UltraStar brands, though I see on their website the once fashionable bicapitalisation has been dropped.
I still have my original IBM and Hitachi drives. They chugged away for years, but now lie in a pile of disks too small to use.
Here's a pile of drives on a desk, snapped a few minutes ago. I pulled in a few dead WDs just for fun.
-- -
Oh, I think Esquire still sell Hitachi HDDs...?
FuLL_MeT4L
Expert Member
- Joined
- Oct 25, 2004
- Messages
- 1,230
Good read, thanks for sharing Arthur!
Something you also need to remember about that article is that those hard drives are on 24/7 and probably all reading/writing constantly in a very hot, cramped environment. Their lifespan is going to be a lot less than the HDD in your PC tower at home.
Not necessarily. Leaving drives powered on doesn't shorten their lifespan nearly as much as power-on/power-off cycles. You have to look at actual powered-on hours.
The single biggest killer of electronic and electromechanical gadgetry is thermal cycling.
Last edited:
grimstoner
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Nov 27, 2009
- Messages
- 311
?
Uh... Nokia 6310?
Claymore
Executive Member
- Joined
- Jan 20, 2004
- Messages
- 8,343
Also, they bought drives at the cheapest price, and they run the drives in 45-drive custom-made chassis; the chassis have severe vibration problems, especially the earlier revisions, and most likely their earlier drives are Seagates.
Indeed, a drive that is left powered on constantly 24/7 should last longer than a drive which is powered up and down every day (thermal cycling and other variables). It's like a car that does 1,000km on a highway versus a car that does 1,000km in stop start traffic, the latter will wear quicker.
When people ask me what HDD they should buy, my response is which ever is cheaper and whichever has the best warranty. You can buy a HDD in good faith based on any number of studies and reports and surveys, but at the end of the day you might just get a dud, or you might drop it, or might just fail, or it might go on perfectly for 10 years. You just don't know, so get what suits you at the time and backup.
When people ask me what HDD they should buy, my response is which ever is cheaper and whichever has the best warranty. You can buy a HDD in good faith based on any number of studies and reports and surveys, but at the end of the day you might just get a dud, or you might drop it, or might just fail, or it might go on perfectly for 10 years. You just don't know, so get what suits you at the time and backup.