Western Digital Ruined Hitachi

I am a HUGE fan of Hitachi hard drives...or at least I was.

Hitachi's have been affordable, very reliable, perform well under heat, easy to manage in a RAID, and affordable.  Did I mention it was affordable?  They were damn-near perfect.  I used to buy up Hitachi bare drives at 7200 RPM on Amazon with free shipping for about the same (or less) than a Western Digital Green...which is just all-around terrible.  IntelliPower?  IntelliSeek?  No, you don't know when or which video file I want to use, so keep the disk spinning like it should be so I don't have to deal with stupid beach balls!  (Final Cut editors, you know what I'm talking about)

In two months, it makes one year since Western Digital bought out Hitachi for something like $4.5 Billion USD.  Since than, it's been a nightmare to get a hold of any Hitachi hard drive.  For some horrible reason, the FTC said it was okay for WD to buy out one of only three hard drive manufacturers (essentially creating a duopoly), but then forced WD to sell all Hitachi's manufacturing facilities and technologies to Toshiba.  What does Toshiba know about making good hard drives? I don't know, I've never owned one.  Don't plan to, either.

Amazon stills lists Hitachi (now branded HGST) 3TB 7200RPM hard drives...for $200.  Not bad, until you see the Seagate and WD Greens listed for $130.  What the hell!?


Now it's affecting G-Technology (or so I assume, considering they are were creative-professionals-oriented).  I had been advising my company to use G-Drives for on-set and facility transport drives for years.  They are excellent drives, with high-quality internal electronics, especially when Hitachi had bought them out a few years ago.

A few months ago we had to purchase more G-Drives for a specific project, when the bomb had hit me.  Their assortment of USB 2/Firewire/eSATA connections have been replaced.  They REMOVED eSATA in place of USB 3.  Professional creatives out there, how many of your workstations feature/can easily upgrade to USB 3?  If you're like me, the answer is NONE!  Why the frick would you remove the fastest connection for the still-slowest next-gen connection?  Why not upgrade the USB 2 into a USB 3!?  Yeah yeah it's fast, blah blah...those numbers are burst speeds.  Copy 600GB in a single action and tell me it's done in an hour and a half.

So we had to buy these new G-Drives with FW800 as its fastest option.  I had them daisy-chained and began copying data somewhere north of 400 GB...until the drives disappeared after 500 MB.  That's M, not G.  It was so consistent, I showed it off to everyone in the office along with a word of warning.  The last drives to do that to me were MyBooks about 5 years ago...now who made those again?

I don't care if my assumption is right or wrong...I blame WD's consumerism on dumbing-down and ruining the best drives the film industry had.

Screw you Western Digital.  You too FTC for letting them get away with robbery.