I am the head of a huge Macintosh user group (over 8,700 users) and I get asked about the "best brand of external hard drive" constantly. So I've been very careful to follow users' experiences, reviews, etc. so that I am on top of this area.
Choosing an external hard drive currently is really difficult, because several old faithful brands have been churning out extremely problematic drives. Notably Western Digital and Seagate. Iomega (there is currently another thread about Iomega drives right here on this discussion forum) and LaCie are two other companies that lots of folks have had trouble with recently. (Iomega and LaCie don't make the internal mechanisms in their drives, but it appears that the problems with their external hard drives are not related to the brand of internal mechanism.)
I wanted to make sure that what I thought that I was seeing was correct, so I asked an expert about his view.
I got this e-mail back from:
Drew Janssen, MacDFI
Pres/CEO Drive Rescue, Inc.
Data Recovery & Forensics
Drive Rescue - Professional Data Recovery
443-310-7920
Randy B. Singer wrote:
>> I was wondering if I could draw on your recent experience.
Absolutely.
>> I've been hearing from a surprising number of folks lately who have been having problems with both Seagate and Western Digital hard drives. The latter, especially, seem to >> be a problem for Mac users because of energy-saving features that Mac users can't disable. But it seems as if both companies are churning out drives at a low cost at the
>> expense of quality control.
I think that's a fair assessment. There's a major difference between
WD and Seagate in the area of quality control. WD has, for years,
employed the services of multiple vendors to make their drives. This
has been proved out in the rebuilding process. Technicians would
frequently open drives to replace parts, have a ready clone available
to cannibalize for parts, only to discover the internal pieces didn't
match.
Over time, technicians like myself came to see that WD labels with
batch lots and manufacturer's dates were actually nothing more than a
reflection of when the drives passed through WD's testing facility
combined with when the labels were printed. Drives would arrive from
the various subcontractors, built with external cases specified by WD,
but internal parts chosen by the subcontractors. So long as the
drives passed WD's tests, they were labeled and sent on to the
public. This inconsistency of internal parts created a nightmare for
recovery companies engaged in rebuilding drives.
At least with Seagate, the batch numbers, lots numbers, serials and
dates meant something. Even if they used subcontractors, the batches
and lots were all labeled together. Internal parts were consistent
across a line, such as the Momentus line of laptop drives for example.
They all came from the same factory, using the same internal parts, so
rebuilding was a matter of matching drives to batch and lot numbers,
within a certain date range. It also seemed the quality control was
much better overall. Sadly, I think there have been issues of late
when it comes to Seagate's quality controls. They still are much
easier to rebuild, but I will admit I've seen failure rates which are
higher than in the past. Still nowhere close to the abysmal
performance rates of WD drives, but slipping from the high standards
of dependability of before.
>> Meanwhile, everyone seems to be very happy with Hitachi drives lately. (No more "deathstars".) With the exception of folks who purchased Mac mini's a couple of years ago >> with OEM Hitachi's in them.
Hitachi is a middle of the road drive manufacturer who seems to have
maintained decent quality control standards. They aren't the best in
the business, but they seem better due to slippage in the Seagate
line.
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Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)
Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
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