Ultrastar (WD brand)

Last updated

Ultrastar is a Western Digital brand of enterprise-class high performance 3.5-inch hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). [1] For years the product line holds a reputation of the most reliable magnetic storage on the market.

Contents

History

The brand was originally introduced by IBM in 1994 for enterprise-level HDDs together with home-computing oriented Deskstar model. These drives were based on revolutionary metalized glass disk technology. In 2003 IBM's HDD business was acquired by Hitachi, reorganized as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies(HGST) which was sold, splitting the business between Western Digital and Toshiba in 2012. The part acquired by Western Digital has retained the "HGST Ultrastar" brand name. Western Digital continued using the HGST prefix on product labels, slowly phasing it out. This resulted in that some models were sold under both HGST and WD branding simultaneously (e.g. the HGST Ultrastar He10 and WD Ultrastar HC510 are the same models of HDD). [2]

These drives are typically used with enterprise computer systems. The two 1994 models, the 10.8 GB Ultrastar2 and the 8.7 GB Ultrastar2 XP were offered with a variety of interfaces including Fast SCSI, Fast-Wide SCSI, SCA 80-pin connectors, and Serial Storage Architecture. Evaluations units were available in the third quarter of 1995. [3]

Current HDD models are offered with capacities up to 28 TB and with SATA or SAS interfaces. [1] Current SSD models are offered with capacities up to 61.44 TB and with SATA and NVMe interface. [1]

Controversies

The IBM's revolutionary technology of metal-coated glass plates initially was plagued with bad adhesion of the metal layer and its consequent delamination with irreparable disk failure. This problem was particularly common in sibling Deskstar DTLA series drives.

As of January 2025, Western Digital follows dishonest internal policy of refusing to update the warranty status (warranty start date) for the drives purchased 1 year and later after manufacturing. This effectively decimates the promised 5-years warranty for drives purchased from the retailer stocks to shorter terms.

Wester digital also refuses warranty claims by private customers for OEM drives, which constitute the main mass of drives sold by the Internet retailers.

After acquiring, Western Digital started shipping "Refurbished" and "Recertified" second-hand Ultrastar drives from data-centers cheaply in large amounts, which is actively used by the Internet cons, selling them as new.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hard disk drive</span> Electro-mechanical data storage device

A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Western Digital</span> American digital storage corporation

Western Digital Corporation is an American data storage company headquartered in San Jose, California. It has a decades-long history in the electronics industry as an integrated circuit and data memory technology developer. It is one of the world's largest computer hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers, along with producing solid-state drives (SSDs) and flash memory devices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seagate Technology</span> American data storage company

Seagate Technology Holdings plc is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Fremont, California, United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology</span> Monitoring system in computer drives

Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology is a monitoring system included in computer hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). Its primary function is to detect and report various indicators of drive reliability, or how long a drive can function while anticipating imminent hardware failures.

The HP Storageworks XP is a computer data storage disk array sold by Hewlett Packard Enterprise using Hitachi Data Systems hardware and adding their own software to it. It's based on the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and targeted towards enabling large scale consolidation, large database, Oracle, SAP, Exchange, and online transaction processing (OLTP) environments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Western Digital Raptor</span>

The Western Digital Raptor is a discontinued series of high performance hard disk drives produced by Western Digital first marketed in 2003. The drive occupied a niche in the enthusiast, workstation and small-server market. Traditionally, the majority of servers used hard drives featuring a SCSI interface because of their advantages in both performance and reliability over consumer-level ATA drives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microdrive</span> One-inch hard disk format by IBM and Hitachi

The Microdrive was a miniature, 1-inch hard disk drive released in 1998 by IBM. The idea was originally created in 1992 by duo Timothy J. Riley and Thomas R. Albrecht at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose. A team of engineers and designers at IBM's Fujisawa, Japan facility helped make the creation of the drive possible.

Perpendicular recording, also known as conventional magnetic recording (CMR), is a technology for data recording on magnetic media, particularly hard disks. It was first proven advantageous in 1976 by Shun-ichi Iwasaki, then professor of the Tohoku University in Japan, and first commercially implemented in 2005. The first industry-standard demonstration showing unprecedented advantage of PMR over longitudinal magnetic recording (LMR) at nanoscale dimensions was made in 1998 at IBM Almaden Research Center in collaboration with researchers of Data Storage Systems Center (DSSC) – a National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center (ERCs) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).

A hybrid drive is a logical or physical computer storage device that combines a faster storage medium such as solid-state drive (SSD) with a higher-capacity hard disk drive (HDD). The intent is adding some of the speed of SSDs to the cost-effective storage capacity of traditional HDDs. The purpose of the SSD in a hybrid drive is to act as a cache for the data stored on the HDD, improving the overall performance by keeping copies of the most frequently used data on the faster SSD drive.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deskstar</span> Line of computer hard disk drives

Deskstar was the name of a product line of computer hard disk drives. It was originally announced by IBM in October 1994. The line was continued by Hitachi, when in 2003 it bought IBM's hard disk drive division and renamed it Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. In 2012, Hitachi sold the division to Western Digital, who continued the drive product line brand as HGST Deskstar. In 2018, Western Digital began winding down the HGST brand, and as of 2020 it is defunct.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HGST</span> Computer storage device manufacturer

HGST, Inc. was a manufacturer of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and external storage products and services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Travelstar</span> Brand of hard disk drive

Travelstar was a brand of 2.5-inch hard disk drive (HDD) that was introduced by IBM in 1994 with the announcement of the Travelstar LP. At 12.5 mm high with two platters, they were available in 360, 540 and 720 MB capacities. Initial models were industry-leading for small form factor HDDs in terms of areal density, data transfer rates and shock tolerance (500g).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of hard disk drives</span>

In 1953, IBM recognized the immediate application for what it termed a "Random Access File" having high capacity and rapid random access at a relatively low cost. After considering technologies such as wire matrices, rod arrays, drums, drum arrays, etc., the engineers at IBM's San Jose California laboratory invented the hard disk drive. The disk drive created a new level in the computer data hierarchy, then termed Random Access Storage but today known as secondary storage, less expensive and slower than main memory but faster and more expensive than tape drives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Solid-state drive</span> Computer storage device with no moving parts

A solid-state drive (SSD) is a type of solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuits to store data persistently. It is sometimes called semiconductor storage device, solid-state device, or solid-state disk.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seagate Barracuda</span> Series of hard disk drives produced by Seagate Technology

The Seagate Barracuda is a series of hard disk drives and later solid state drives produced by Seagate Technology that was first introduced in 1993.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SanDisk Professional</span> Professional storage products by Western Digital

SanDisk Professional is a brand of Western Digital that produces external storage products designed and marketed for the Macintosh, creative pro, photography and A/V markets. Its USB, FireWire, eSATA, SAS, SCSI Thunderbolt, and Fibre Channel systems support all levels of audio/video production.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Universal Storage Platform</span> Enterprise storage array

Universal Storage Platform (USP) was the brand name for an Hitachi Data Systems line of computer data storage disk arrays circa 2004 to 2010.

Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 is the brand name of Hitachi Data Systems mid-range storage platforms.

Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is a magnetic storage data recording technology used in hard disk drives (HDDs) to increase storage density and overall per-drive storage capacity. Conventional hard disk drives record data by writing non-overlapping concentric magnetic tracks, while shingled recording writes new tracks that overlap part of the previously written magnetic track, leaving the previous track narrower and allowing higher track density. Thus, the tracks partially overlap similar to roof shingles. This approach was selected because, if the writing head is made too narrow, it cannot provide the very high fields required in the recording layer of the disk.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Data Center Storage Solutions" (PDF). Western Digital. Retrieved May 22, 2021.
  2. ↑ "Product Manual: Ultrastar DC HC510 (He10) OEM Specification - SATA models". UserManual.wiki. Retrieved 2021-10-11.
  3. ↑ Francis, Bob (October 17, 1994). IBM's disk drive family has three new members. Infoworld. p. 40. Retrieved May 23, 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.