Hitachi GST, a subdivision on Hitachi Ltd, is being sold to Western Digital in the 3rd quarter of 2011. Hitachi had previously, in 2003, bought IBM’s hard drive division.

Hitachi manufacture 4 product lines of hard drives, the 2 that are common in the consumer range are the Deskstar and Travelstar. Hitachi desktop drives (Deskstar) are not common in South Africa so are not often found in computer systems.  The Travelstar, however, ship with numerous brands of laptop manufacturers including Dell, HP and Lenovo. Due to these drives being shipped with laptops there are a number of the Travelstar drives in circulation, although Hitachi are not popular in terms of aftermarket sales.

Hitachi hard drives are generally found to be robust for the most part in terms of electronics and firmware, however the Travelstar series does seem to suffer with read/write head degradation.

Hitachi Hard drive data recovery relating to Hitachi hard drives includes:

• Logical data recovery involving repair of the file system stored on the hard drive, damaged by virus attacks, user error or hardware failure.
• Electrical data recovery involving repair or replacement of the main electrical components (PCB), damaged by static, bad power or surges, or user damage.
• Physical data recovery involving repair or replacement of the mechanical components within the hard drive internals. This includes replacement of the head stack assembly (HSA), motor spindle, or any other parts requiring repair or replacement. Damage to these components is often by wear and tear, manufacturing defects or user damage such as a drop or fall.