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Comment by ShinyObject | Hacker News Reader

The Hitachi drives are Toshiba drives.

The 3.5" desktop and server Hitachi drives are all manufactured by Toshiba. WD wanted to buy Hitachi's drive division so there would be a WD/Seagate drive duopoly, European regulators said they had to sell Hitachi's 3.5" to someone else before they would approve the merger. Toshiba stepped up and got it.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5635/western-digital-to-sell-h...

So yes it is somewhat confusing. You buy one of these drives and it will say "HGST a Western Digital company" on the box, when in reality it's all made by Toshiba, probably in an old Hitachi factory.

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Toshiba drives are not exactly Hitachi drives.

First, Toshiba had their own 3.5" drives long before the merger with Hitachi. For example, Toshiba MK2002TSKB 2TB 3.5" hard drive was on sale since 2011.

Toshiba's own design and factories wouldn't magically disappear after acquiring Hitachi's assets. So, after the merger, Toshiba sells some ex-Hitachi drives, for example toshiba DT01ACA300 3TB is obviously a relabeled Hitachi drive. But I believe that Toshiba MD03ACA300 3TB and Toshiba MD04ACA300 3TB drives are based on Toshiba's own design because they don't look like Hitachi or DT01ACA300. I suppose reliability and performance will be different between these three Toshiba 3TB drives. And it would be interesting to get some info on this.

Also, HGST is wholly owned by Western Digital. Despite regulators requirement, they didn't sell all 3.5" assets to Toshiba, only some of them. Most of the good stuff (that is, everything currently sold under HGST brand) still went to WD. So, even ex-Hitachi drives sold under Toshiba brand (by Toshiba) and under HGST brand (by WD) might have different reliability.

There's a much less sinister reason for WD buying HGST: SCSI/SAS support. Way back when in the '90s WD tried to enter that market, and a company I was at even got some of those drives, but from what I heard while their read rate was OK their write rates weren't competitive with Seagate and IBM (which sold their disk drive business to Hitachi after the Deathstar screwup). And they exited that segment of the business, and hadn't, last time I checked, returned to it.

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