Update: This issue has been covered in the Blackblaze 2020 report. They apparently existed in parallel. The original HGST drives, while still existed as of 2020, were being gradually phased out...
> These drives obviously share their lineage with the HGST drives, but they report their manufacturer as WDC versus HGST. The model numbers are similar with the first three characters changing from HUH to WUH and the last three characters changing from 604, for example, to 6L4. We don’t know the significance of that change, perhaps it is the factory location, a firmware version, or some other designation. If you know, let everyone know in the comments. As with all of the major drive manufacturers, the model number carries patterned information relating to each drive model and is not randomly generated, so the 6L4 string would appear to mean something useful.
I believe hese new HGST drives are WDs.
The HGST drives in the older backblaze stats (which showed good reliability) continue to be manufactured by/evolved into Toshibas. There are several HGST model numbers that remained in Toshiba's lineup.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/5635/western-digital-to-sell-...
I'm wary of Amazon due to co-mingling issues. I can't be sure I'm not getting something incorrectly packaged/labelled by another seller so I get a reconditioned (or simply counterfeit) unit instead of a new one.
Yes. WD did a rebranding exercise to try and get rid of HGST and UltraStar, not only did the retail channel and wholesale channel backfire, a certain large enterprise customer insist on the same HGST and UltraStar HDD, same model number, basically same everything. While HD could certainly ignore retail and wholesale, they cant ignore enterprise. So you still see UltraStar, and in many cases Wholesale are still calling them HGST.