<< Muso’s amongst you will have instantly spotted that I’ve used the title of a 1978 album by questionable UK prog-rocker’s Genesis as my title for this blog post.
If you did – Congratulations! – You need to get out more!
But what on earth have the theatrical-with-a-really-weird-former-lead-singer trio got to do with hard disks I hear you ask?
Ah well, that’s easy cos just like Genesis now having only 3 members (the baldy one who sings, the beardy one who plays the guitar, and the artsy wavy haired one who plays keyboards), there are now only 3 manufacturers of hard disks left in the world – Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba.
Six months ago there were 5 big names in the hard disk manufacturing industry: Seagate, Samsung, Western Digital, Hitachi, and Toshiba…
Then Seagate bought Samsung.
And now, WD have bought Hitachi.
So, if you do your maths, you’ll be thinking that 5 – 2 = 3… But really, it doesn’t, it leaves 2 as Toshiba are much smaller than the other two. Seagate and WD combined ship over 80% of the world’s hard drives.
And neither Seagate or WD have embraced SSD technology either… because for over 90% of the worlds data storage needs, SSD hard disk drives are not viable as they are just not up to the job.
So what memories do we have of Hitachi?
Well, their final hard drives were quite good really – easy to work on from a data recovery point of view, but perhaps the most enduring memory will be for the shockingly appalling series of hard drives known as ‘Deskstars’ that they inherited from IBM when Hitachi bought them out in 2003.
(Un)affectionately known as “Deathstars” – because they failed so often with the most common failure symptom being a repetitive ‘click of death’, the most infamous of all Deskstar’s was the GXP75 series. So bad were these drives that in 2006, Deskstars were ranked 18th in PC World’s “Worst Tech Products of All Time”.
These drives didn’t just fail, they really failed, often so badly that data recovery wasn’t possible.
Sometimes a family of hard drives will be shipped with a problem that is not detected until they are out in the real world. This is really bad, very embarrassing and very expensive for the hard drive manufacturer as frequently all the drives have to be recalled.
But the Deskstar didn’t have one of these problems.. oh no, it had 4 of them…