IBM Deskstar 75GXP

Farewell Hitachi GST, we’ll miss you

In Blog, Hard Disk Drive News by Administrator

No more Hitachi hard disk drives?

With Western Digital taking over Hitachi GST there aren’t many hard disk manufacturers left. There might seem like lots when you look to buy a disk, but really there is only Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. And you tend to only get Toshiba HDDs as OEM products. So that’s not so much choice at all.

In recent years Hitachi has been making some good hard disk drives. We haven’t actually seen many of their desktop HDDs in, they have tended to be relatively reliable. The Hitachi firmware architecture was pleasant to work with the only exception of problems with the NVRAM and having to find an awkward donor part. The same could be said for Samsung too.

IBM Deskstar 75GXP

Ohh dear, I expect the story did not have a happy ending for this hard disk drive

Seagate and Western Digital

So just left with Seagate and Western Digital. From a data recovery standpoint, both manufacturers make ‘awkward’ HDDs to perform data recovery on. The Seagate firmware F3 architecture is not as simple to manipulate as on older series (Barracuda 7200.10 and earlier) and it’s not possible to initialise the hard disk from a single head. The WD ROYL series can be problematic also, not least the issues associated with their integrated ROM

All of this won’t mean much to most people. What will is our favourite bit of IBM/Hitachi hard disk history with the infamous Deskstar GXP75. I still see a few ‘Deathstars’ come in for recovery. I’m amazed they’ve lasted so long. When they do come in they have all manner of faults. I won’t miss these.