Ultrastar is a

Western Digital Western Digital Corporation is an American data storage company headquartered in San Jose, California. Established in 1970, the company is one of the world's largest manufacturers of hard disk drives (HDDs). History 1970s Western Digital ...

brand of enterprise-class high performance 3.5-inch

hard disk drive 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 hard disk drive platter, pla ...

s (HDDs) and

solid-state drive 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. SSDs rely on non- ...

s (SSDs). For years the product line holds a reputation of the most reliable magnetic storag

on the market.

History

The brand was originally introduced by IBM in 1994 for enterprise-level HDDs together with home-computing oriented

Deskstar 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, Ltd., Hitachi, when in 2003 it bought IBM's hard disk drive division and renamed it HGST, ...

model. These drives were based on revolutionary metalized glass disk technology. In 2003 IBM's HDD business was acquired by

Hitachi () is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in 1910 and headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo. The company is active in various industries, including digital systems, power and renewable ener ...

, reorganized as

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies HGST, Inc. (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 driv ...

(HGST) which was sold, splitting the business between

and

Toshiba is a Japanese multinational electronics company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure systems, elevators and escalators, electronic components, semiconductors ...

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). 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. Current HDD models are offered with capacities up to 28 TB and with SATA or SAS interfaces.
Current SSD models are offered with capacities up to 61.44 TB and with SATA and

NVMe NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via the PCI Express bus. The in ...

interface.

References

Hard disk drives Divested IBM products Hitachi products IBM storage devices Western Digital products {{compu-hardware-stub

History

See also

References