HGST Ultrastar Enterprise Drives

Ultrastar is the enterprise drive line that began at Hitachi, passed to HGST, and now sits under Western Digital. All three names appear on drives still in service, and our listings carry them as they are labelled — so searching for Hitachi Ultrastar and searching for HGST will both find stock.

The families, and what the names mean

• He8, He10, He12 — helium-filled 3.5-inch drives. Sealing helium inside instead of air reduces drag on the platters, which is what allowed more platters in the same case. The practical effects are higher capacity per bay and lower power and heat per terabyte.
• HC320, HC550 — the current naming for the same 3.5-inch enterprise line after the Western Digital merger. An HC-numbered drive is the continuation of the He family, not a different class of product.
• C10K, C15K — 2.5-inch small form factor drives at 10,000 and 15,000 RPM. Chosen for latency rather than capacity, typically in older transactional workloads.
• 7K3000, 7K6000 — 7,200 RPM 3.5-inch capacity drives from the earlier generations.
• SS200, SSD1600MR — SAS solid state drives sold under the Ultrastar name.

Terms on the listings that change what you get

• SED — self-encrypting drive. Encryption happens in the drive controller. Useful for decommissioning and for compliance, but a SED in an array that expects plain drives can complicate a rebuild.
• ISE — Instant Secure Erase. The drive holds an internal key and erasing it renders data unreadable immediately, instead of requiring a full overwrite pass.
• 512e — 4K physical sectors presented to the host as 512-byte sectors. 512n is natively 512-byte. Mixing the two inside one array is not always supported and is worth checking before you buy.
• BDE — bulk data encryption, another controller-level encryption variant.

SAS or SATA

Ultrastar drives ship in both. The difference that usually matters is not speed but topology: SAS drives are dual-ported, so two controllers can reach the same drive, which is what multipath and controller failover designs depend on. SATA is single-ported and generally cheaper per terabyte.

Send us the controller or enclosure model and the sector format you are running and we will match the drive rather than leaving 512e against 512n to chance.