Western Digital moves away from the HGST branding
WD will be phasing out the HGST branding, perhaps not the best move? HGST HDDs gained much popularity due to strong reliability. The first move is the name change of the Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC320. The HDD, targeted at data center usage, earlier released as HGST Ultrastar 7K8.
WD feels the old branding is not in line with Western Digital’s new branding policies, mentioned WD in a blog on the Western Digital website, writes myce.
HGST’s director of HDD product line management, Lenny Sharp, writes, “all new commercial and enterprise products going forward will carry this new Western Digital branding as we transition away from the HGST brand. Western Digital has gone through a significant transformation with the integration of multiple companies. Moving to the Western Digital brand for all of our commercial and enterprise products is the first step in unifying the brands in our portfolio.”
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) was founded in 2003, and was a merger between the hard disk drive businesses of IBM and Hitachi. In 2012, Western Digital acquired HGST and it was planned that HGST would continue with its own brand name and product lines. That era now ends. In 2015, Western Digital also acquired Sandisk, according to today’s announcement also that brand name will likely disappear for commercial and enterprise products and will be replaced by the Western Digital brand.
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Senior Member
Posts: 3372
Joined: 2007-05-31
it's just the final of the takeover by WD...
btw both where top HDD, and now that WD have a Pro brand, HGST is useless (btw only the brand deseapear... the quality stay)
Junior Member
Posts: 17
Joined: 2010-12-17
I guess those of us who know that HGST is generally much more reliable than all other mechanical HDD brands/products will have to figure out which future WD drives correspond to HGST... if that turns out to even be the case.
Senior Member
Posts: 240
Joined: 2017-08-22
Exactly, this is a weird move for WD. HGST reliability is well documented and known to those in working in IT / datacenters.
Junior Member
Posts: 16
Joined: 2017-02-28
Or in other words, we're screwed.

Senior Member
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Joined: 2013-03-10
I never owned a HGST HDD but most of my HDDs are WD (I have some others as external HDDs), so that doesn't matter overly much to me personally. However, Sandisk is my number 1 choice when I buy SD cards for phones, cameras, and such. Are those going to be WD as well? Western Digital might really hurt themselves there in the future as there are lots of people relying on SD cards (and other solid memory card formats) who have little personal connection to PC parts and thus the name Western Digital. They would merely think Sandisk disappeared from the market and go for their second choice. The same might apply to USB flash drives to a lesser degree as Sandisk is one of the premium names there, but who has ever heard of Wester Digital usb thumb drives?