[SOLVED] Can anyone confirm whether Western Digital drives are now just rebadged HGST?

[bit_user]

I bought 4x Western Digital Gold 4 TB (WD4002FYYZ) drives, a couple years ago, and they're awful. They sat around, and I now finally got around to using them. They're really hot, and one already failed after 2 days of use. The recoverable error counts on 3 of them are also quite high, and the other one is better, but I still wonder if it's not higher than it should be.

I'm going to RMA the failed one, out of principle, but I'm not sure I want to use the refurb drive they're going to send me, as a replacement. Instead, I'm thinking about replacing it with a drive of another brand. However, the reviews on the Seagate Constellation ES.3 (ST4000NM0033) aren't exactly stellar. So, I'm thinking maybe I'll give HGST a try, since they have a pretty good reputation.

WDC bought HGST, a several years back, and I noticed the specs on the newer version (WD4003FRYZ) of their 4 TB Gold drive are the same as the 4 TB Ultrastar DC HC310 (HUS726T4TALE6L4). Since the Ultrastar is a little harder to find (and I want to make sure I get it from somewhere that will sell a truly new drive, with full warranty coverage), I'd rather buy the WD Gold version, if they're the same.

Datasheets:

• https://documents.westerndigital.co...wd-gold/product-brief-wd-gold-2579-810192.pdf
• https://documents.westerndigital.co...c300-series/data-sheet-ultrastar-dc-hc310.pdf

Note: I'm not sure they're all HGST rebadges, since the specs on some of the larger WDC Golds are a lot worse - more similar to the previous generation.

BTW, the WDC Black drives that these are replacing were just awesome. But, those were from like 2010. I've run them too long, already, and I need more space. It seems like Western Digital's quality fell off a cliff, at some point between then and 2017 (when I my Gold drives were made). That's probably why they bought HGST.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Are you using these in an NAS or server?

Man, right now myself, and several others here, have had TREMENDOUS success with the Seagate Ironwolf drives. I think for this segment they are a cut above for Enterprise or server type applications. I'm not a fan really of Seagate's consumer mainstream products, per se, but their industrial drives are terrific. My 16TB is quiet, cool and relatively fast considering it's a spinning mechanical drive.

 

[fzabkar]

Some WD drives, particularly the helium models, are rebadged HGSTs. Conversely, some HGST models are rebadged WDs.

You can tell the difference by examining the WWN on the label. The PCB part number is another indicator. If you have some photos, I can show you what to look for.

 

[Darkbreeze]

HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) was a manufacturer of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and external storage products and services.

It was initially a subsidiary of Hitachi, formed through its acquisition of IBM's disk drive business. It was acquired by Western Digital in 2012, but required to operate autonomously from the remainder of the company due to conditions imposed by Chinese regulators. However, in October 2015, Chinese regulators permitted Western Digital to begin wider integration of HGST into its main business. By 2018, the HGST brand had been phased out, with its remaining products now marketed under the Western Digital name.

 

[fzabkar]

I have examined the ROM resident firmware in the recent WD and HGST models. Each has a new architecture which is unrelated to earlier firmware versions, but these new architectures differ completely from each other. So I'm left to wonder whether the two platforms will continue to undergo separate development, but under a single WD brand. That will make it harder to tell them apart.

 

[bit_user]

Are you using these in an NAS or server?

Home-built server. I had one NAS, and have since then built my own. I've found that Linux software RAID is plenty fast, for a reasonable number of SATA drives.

Man, right now myself, and several others here, have had TREMENDOUS success with the Seagate Ironwolf drives.

Thanks for the recommendation. I hate to "reward" WDC for selling me garbage, by buying another Gold-series drive.

 

[bit_user]

Just to follow up on this, I ended up getting a newer WD Gold drive, and it indeed indicates it's from HGST. Right below the bar codes, on the line above "Made in Thailand" (both the old & new drives were made there) there's a line reading: "Powered by Ultrastar(TM)".

Also, near the bottom of the label, there's what turns out to be the address of HGST Europe:

Taurusavenue 5,​

2132 LS Hoofddorp NL​

Written just like that (which I linked to Google Maps). The old drive has no comparable text or address .

I caution anyone against assuming that all WD Gold drives are now HGST.

So far, I've run the full self-test and Linux' badblocks. It passed both of those and is running faster, cooler, and quieter than its older counterparts. That said, it doesn't expose the number of recoverable errors. So, I can't properly judge their relative quality, on one of the most important aspects.

Man, right now myself, and several others here, have had TREMENDOUS success with the Seagate Ironwolf drives. I think for this segment they are a cut above for Enterprise or server type applications. I'm not a fan really of Seagate's consumer mainstream products, per se, but their industrial drives are terrific. My 16TB is quiet, cool and relatively fast considering it's a spinning mechanical drive.

Thanks, again, for the advice. I am using 4 TB for cost reasons & because I judged it to be plenty of space for my needs, when I bought the original drives in mid-2017. The worst thing about RAID is how quickly the disk drive prices multiply.

Anyway, here's how the new, HGST-made 4 TB WD Gold drive compares with the latest 4 TB, 7200 RPM Seagate Iron Wolf Pro drive:

Parameter	WD4003FRYZ	ST4000NE0025
Max Sustained xfer rate (MB/sec)	255​	214​
Cache (MB)	256​	128​
Active Power (W)	7.0​	8.5​
Idle Power (W)	5.9​	5.5​
MTBF (Million Hours)	2.0​	1.2​
AFR (%)	0.44​	0.73​
Idle Noise (dB)	29​	27​
Seek Noise (dB)	36​	28​

Notes:

• The ST4000NE001 seems to be newer, though its specs appear identical, aside from burning about 0.5 W more power.
• AFR = Annualized Failure Rate
• MTBF and AFR have the usual caveats of being projections and not guaranteed.
• Acoustic Noise is presumably A-weighted, but Seagate didn't specify.
• Both drives are 7200 RPM and Advanced Format (512e = 512/4096 logical/native sectors)
• Seagate gets credit for providing a few more performance and reliability stats.

For me, the biggest single factor was power. Given how concerned I am about temps of the 3 remaining non-HGST WD Gold drives in my array, I wanted to go for a lower-power drive. On top of that, nearly all the stats of the HGST drive are the same or better, and their reputation is the icing on the cake. So, I overcame my disdain towards WDC for their older, garbage WD4002FYYZ drives, and paid them for one of the newer model to replace the "failed" drive.

I still haven't run their RMA qualification test, to see if they consider it failed, but I will not use a drive with multiple unrecoverable reads (much less, one with so few hours on it). If it doesn't qualify for RMA, I'll probably run some torture tests on it (though, being a datacenter drive, that should not qualify as abuse!), until it does.

BTW, your 16 TB drive wasn't included in the datasheet I saw (and is well outside my price range), so I didn't check how it compares.

 

[fzabkar]

Check the SMART report with smartmontools.

 

[bit_user]

Check the SMART report with smartmontools.

That's what I'm talking about. It says device statistics (GP/SMART Log 0x04) aren't supported, on the new (HGST) drive.

I'm using a GUI front end called gsmartcontrol (which I highly recommend), but even the raw smartctl output confirms this. However, it does mention something about the drive not being in the smartctl database. Or, maybe the issue is smartctl just isn't correctly parsing the output, since I see 0x04 listed twice, in the device's Log Directory output.

Anyway, the older drives have both "attributes" and "statistics". The statistics includes a stat called "Read Recovery Attempts", which is about 6,000 on 2 of the drives, about 12,000 on the failed drive (the one with 10 unrecoverable errors), and about 600 on a 4th drive of the same model. All of those drives have < 100 hours on them, and were only read/written a few times.

 

[fzabkar]

Here is a thread which illustrates how to detect a rebadged HGST HDD:

https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=39354

The WWN on the label is 5000CCAnnnnnnnnn. That's HGST.

The part number on the PCB is 006-OA90701. That's also a HGST number. WD's PCB part numbers are 2060-nnnnnn.

WD's R/N number usually incorporates the nnnnnn component of the PCB part number.

The US7SAL080 R/N belongs to HGST:

https://documents.westerndigital.co...t/cert-agency-approval-ultrastar-dc-hc510.pdf

HUH721008ALx6xx -- US7SAL080 -- SATA -- 8TB

 

[NotLarry]

Just to follow up on this, I ended up getting a newer WD Gold drive, and it indeed indicates it's from HGST. Right below the bar codes, on the line above "Made in Thailand" (both the old & new drives were made there) there's a line reading: "Powered by Ultrastar(TM)".

Also, near the bottom of the label, there's what turns out to be the address of HGST Europe:

Taurusavenue 5,​

2132 LS Hoofddorp NL​

Written just like that (which I linked to Google Maps). The old drive has no comparable text or address .

I caution anyone against assuming that all WD Gold drives are now HGST.

So far, I've run the full self-test and Linux' badblocks. It passed both of those and is running faster, cooler, and quieter than its older counterparts. That said, it doesn't expose the number of recoverable errors. So, I can't properly judge their relative quality, on one of the most important aspects.


Thanks, again, for the advice. I am using 4 TB for cost reasons & because I judged it to be plenty of space for my needs, when I bought the original drives in mid-2017. The worst thing about RAID is how quickly the disk drive prices multiply.

Anyway, here's how the new, HGST-made 4 TB WD Gold drive compares with the latest 4 TB, 7200 RPM Seagate Iron Wolf Pro drive:

Parameter	WD4003FRYZ	ST4000NE0025
Max Sustained xfer rate (MB/sec)	255​	214​
Cache (MB)	256​	128​
Active Power (W)	7.0​	8.5​
Idle Power (W)	5.9​	5.5​
MTBF (Million Hours)	2.0​	1.2​
AFR (%)	0.44​	0.73​
Idle Noise (dB)	29​	27​
Seek Noise (dB)	36​	28​

Notes:

• The ST4000NE001 seems to be newer, though its specs appear identical, aside from burning about 0.5 W more power.
• AFR = Annualized Failure Rate
• MTBF and AFR have the usual caveats of being projections and not guaranteed.
• Acoustic Noise is presumably A-weighted, but Seagate didn't specify.
• Both drives are 7200 RPM and Advanced Format (512e = 512/4096 logical/native sectors)
• Seagate gets credit for providing a few more performance and reliability stats.

For me, the biggest single factor was power. Given how concerned I am about temps of the 3 remaining non-HGST WD Gold drives in my array, I wanted to go for a lower-power drive. On top of that, nearly all the stats of the HGST drive are the same or better, and their reputation is the icing on the cake. So, I overcame my disdain towards WDC for their older, garbage WD4002FYYZ drives, and paid them for one of the newer model to replace the "failed" drive.

I still haven't run their RMA qualification test, to see if they consider it failed, but I will not use a drive with multiple unrecoverable reads (much less, one with so few hours on it). If it doesn't qualify for RMA, I'll probably run some torture tests on it (though, being a datacenter drive, that should not qualify as abuse!), until it does.

BTW, your 16 TB drive wasn't included in the datasheet I saw (and is well outside my price range), so I didn't check how it compares.

Hold on there bucko.

Kind of looks like you're listing Seagate model numbers that are end of life.


The problem here is that you had to be in the 4TB range. Seagate doesn't make a great 4TB drive anymore.


Your drive's stats:

Drive Model	OLD / EOL	Capacity	Cache	Price (AUD)
ST4000NE0025	Yes	4TB	128MB	265

You suggested:

Drive Model	OLD / EOL	Capacity	Cache	Price (AUD)
ST4000NE001	No	4TB	128MB	299

Now that drive "seems to be newer" as you put it. It is around the same specs as yours, but isn't end of life and does cost more.

You could instead, spend less money on a 6TB:

Drive Model	OLD / EOL	Capacity	Cache	Price (AUD)
ST6000VN0033	No	6TB	256MB	285

If you tested two drives that were slightly better matched... like the 6TB IronWolf I suggested here + a 6TB WD Black, you'd probably find the WD Black to score higher.
But the price increase of 21% and a performance increase of even 17% wouldn't make it worth it for me.

The general consensus is that IronWolf's are cheaper, quieter and cooler. I've not bothered paying through the nose for a WD drive, so I couldn't form a scientific comparison.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

Last post restored because the OP asked. Apologies to NotLarry as it looks like you were just trying to help. Sometimes we mods can get a little overzealous in dealing with necro posts.

 

[bit_user]

Kind of looks like you're listing Seagate model numbers that are end of life.

Thanks. I didn't see where it was EoL.

The problem here is that you had to be in the 4TB range. Seagate doesn't make a great 4TB drive anymore.

...

The general consensus is that IronWolf's are cheaper, quieter and cooler. I've not bothered paying through the nose for a WD drive, so I couldn't form a scientific comparison.

I appreciate the advice. I made the decision to go with 4 TB in 2017, when I bought the first round of WD Gold drives.

So far, I'm happy with the WD4003FRYZ I bought to replaced the failed WD4002FYYZ. It really is faster, cooler, and certainly no louder. I'm just bummed that I still have 3 of the older model, but not enough that I'm about to replace them (unless/until they also fail).

The 5x WD Black drives I bought in 2010 are all still running like champs, which I guess made me partial to WDC. Only one of them has any errors showing up in smartmon, and those are just 7 "zone select" errors (or something like that).

 

[bit_user]

Here is a thread which illustrates how to detect a rebadged HGST HDD:

https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=39354

You mean its picture, in conjunction with the comments in your post, above? Because, that thread doesn't really seem to deal with detecting a HGST model, but it does include a picture of one, to which you seem to be referring.

Anyway, thanks for the info. I marked yours as the answer, after confirming that my WWN matches the pattern you specified.

The WWN on the label is 5000CCAnnnnnnnnn. That's HGST.

It does. Thanks.

 

[fzabkar]

Sorry, I appear to have linked to the wrong thread. However, the picture does show a WD/HGST drive with a HGST WWN on the label and a HGST part number on the PCB.