What is HGST Ultrastar?

Ultrastar is a Western Digital brand of high performance 3.5-inch hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). The brand was originally introduced by IBM in 1994 for HDDs and was adopted and renamed to “HGST Ultrastar” by HGST after it acquired IBM’s HDD business in 2003.

Are HGST drives still available?

CDW says they were discontinued on October 29th. Looking up the status of HGST, I see that WD had planned on phasing out the brand (and apparently they are already using the Ultrastar name for some of their WD drives). The HGST 10TB drives aren’t that old, so I didn’t expect WD to kill them off already!

Is Ultrastar SMR?

The WD Ultrastar DC H570 is the company’s 22TB drive that uses CMR. The WD Ultrastar DC H670 is the company’s SMR drive that allows for 4TB more to be stored or roughly 18% more at 26TB total capacity. Both drives use OptiNAND technology as WD tries to integrate NAND into its hard drives to improve performance.

What’s wrong with SMR?

It can get bogged down during large writes and become very very slow, like 10MB/s on average slow. Reads are fine it is only writing that is affected. That being said, the SMR technology does make this drive one of the best for $s/TB on the market, just don’t expect amazing performance from it.

Which is better CMR or SMR?

SMR drives are cheaper than CMR hard drives. SMR hard drives are a good choice if they are primarily used for data storage or PCs where large hard drives are used to store data. They offer more storage capacity and are more energy-efficient than CMRs, making them ideal for archiving tasks.

Is HGST part of Western Digital?

HGST, A Western Digital Brand, Provides Storage Products And Solutions That Support Every Stage Of The Workflow For The Media And Entertainment Industry | Western Digital.

What hard drive brand is most reliable?

Let us explore the most reliable external hard drive below.

  • #1) WD Elements Portable Drive.
  • #2) Seagate Portable Drive.
  • #3) Maxone 500GB Ultra Slim Drive.
  • #4) Toshiba Canvio Basics Portable Drive.
  • #5) Silicon Power Portable Drive.
  • #6) LaCie Rugged Mini Drive.
  • #7) SanDisk Extreme Portable External SSD.