Speaking of Hard Drives, What Manufacturer's are left as of 2016?

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MichelPM Author

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81,525 points

Speaking of Hard Drives, What Manufacturer's are left as of 2016?

Seagate and Western Digital are still here.

Are any of Seagate or WD drives any good any longer?

I never liked either of these HD manufacturers.

Anyone recommend a better than average or "best" hard drive from either Seagate or WD!

I have found drives from both these manufacturers wanting and are high on my list of early failure rates

Ironic, that the worst hard drive manufacturers are the ones that survived by buying out ALL of the BETTER (IMHO) hard drive manufacturers.

Is Toshiba still around? What about Hitachi?

Any better than average or "BEST" hard drives from these manufacturers, if they are still around..

Does anyone know what brand of Seagate drives are used in LaCie enclosures?

I called LaCie last year about this, when I found out a year ago, or so, that they got bought out in 2012, but they gave me a very vague answer. They would not tell me what exact Seagate hard drive is used in their enclosures since getting bought out by Seagate.

I got a feeling it is one of Seagate's POS low end hard drives that they are marketing as higher end and marking up substantially under the LaCie name.

I may try calling them or emailing them, again, to try to get a real answer to this once and for all.

How about OWC's own Mercury Pro hard drives? Anyone know what OWC is using for hard drives in their own enclosures?

Are OWC Mercury Pro drives any more durable, longer lasting, lower failure rates, than anyone else at this point?

Is everyone making hard drives and enclosures just using less than optimal Seagate and WD drives, now and just rebranding them with different manufactured enclosures.

I am looking for real answers to this as I just had an older, much better WD 256 GB hard drive finally fail on me after over 10 years and I have one older 512 GB LaCie drive that was still a LaCie made drive from 2009 or 2010 that is still going strong.

I have purchased a Seagate/LaCie branded 2 TB drive in 2014 and just recently purchased a new OWC Mercury Pro 3 TB hard drive (that basically replaced that failed 256 GB WD hard drive).

Will I get my monies worth out of these new hard drives and enjoy the same longevity that I had with my earlier, older drives, or will I have to expect either or both of these drives will fail within a lesser timeframe, like 5 years or less?

I am concerned that I will have to replace one or both of these newly purchased hard drives much sooner than I would comfortably like to have to replace them.

Are newer hard drives being manufactured today better or worse in quality and longevity than the older made hard drives?

I guess that is what ALL my questions really boil down to.

Actual knowledge and thoughtful opinions welcome!

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 27in 3.06 GHz CPU, 1TB, 16 GB RAM

Posted on Mar 4, 2016 3:52 AM

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Answer 1

MichelPM Author

Level 10

81,525 points

Mar 4, 2016 4:47 AM in response to MichelPM

Well,

Through a little web searching and by accident, I found a review of OWC's Mercury Elite Pro 2 TB drive ( I have their 3 TB external drive( and found out they are using Seagate Barracuda drives in their enclosures.

Is this a better than average or good/best Seagate drive OR not so great drive?

I was hoping from the more expensive prices and hype that OWC would be using the best or better hard drives possible in their enclosures.

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Answer 2

den.thed

Level 10

90,670 points

Mar 4, 2016 5:47 AM in response to MichelPM

http://www.southjerseydata.com/hard-drive-manufacturers.html

I still have and use some old branded External HDs, for redundant and/or duplicate backups.

(2 Maxtor 1Touch3's, 2 WD Passports and a Seagate Go Flex)

When it come to my more important (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly) backups and clones, I lean more towards rolling my own.

(2 miniStack FireWire enclosures, 4 Sebrent USB 3.0 enclosures)

The MiniStack's have 2TB Seagates in them and while they seem to be reliable, they are a little noisy.

The 4 Sabrent's all have different drives. (an Apple branded Toshiba, an Apple branded Hitachi, a WD Blue, a PNY SSD)

Personally, I think that it is a good time to start moving away from HDDs and start the transition over to Solid State technology. For example, I have replaced all my Internal HDDs except my oldest (ready to retire) Macwith SSDs and plan on doing the same over time with most of my backup drives.

http://www.computer-hardware-explained.com/hard-drive-manufacturers.html

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Answer 3

Mar 4, 2016 6:04 AM in response to den.thed

I've been told by a reputable Macintosh consultant group owner/president that if SSDs get zapped, then all the data on them will be lost, there is no recovery from them like there is from a standard disk drive.
I am thinking that for long-term archive, I may need to consider DAT tape or some similar method, if there are any.

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Answer 4

MichelPM Author

Level 10

81,525 points

Mar 4, 2016 6:27 AM in response to den.thed

Yeah,

I hear you about SSDs, but I need large storage size SSDs bigger than 256 Gbs and the pricing for these is still prohibitively more expnsive compared to the conventional, lowly mechanical hard drive.

Another year or two, the pricing model will, invariably change in larger favor to SSD drives, but not currently.

Also, don't the current crop of SSDs still suffer from a limit on the amount of data writes to the drive? I do not know what that physical limit is, but wouldn't that fact make these drive more prone to early failure to write to the drive than with conventional mechanically spinning hard drives?

I dunno.

SSD technology, IMHO, is too new a technology still to trust to long term data storage until some of the kinks can be worked out of them, also.

Spinning small, portable mechanical hard drives have been with us for, at least, 20+ years or a little longer.

I am just afraid they aren't being as well manufactured as they have been in the past.

Quicker failure rates/times of conventional hard drives means selling more drives.

Something like what Apple has been doing with their products by not making them very user upgrade friendly, any longer. If something goes bad, it will be a coin toss to decide to fix OR time to purchase another new or used/newer Mac.

I don't see my 2009 iMac making it to 2019, but I could be wrong. I have been taking a lot of precautions to get my iMac to run cooler in an attempt to preserve its operational life.

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Answer 5

MichelPM Author

Level 10

81,525 points

Mar 4, 2016 9:09 AM in response to den.thed

Contacted LaCie by email and here's is, ONCE AGAIN, there non-response to my query.

"Hello Michel,
Thank you for your email. The only information I can provide in regard to the internal drive in our d2 Quadra, is that it will be a Seagate drive.

The model can change based on whatever drive is available at the time of assembly. There is no way for me to know what model you will get inside the d2 you purchase."

Well, no sheet, it's going to have a Seagate drive in it!

You're freakin' company is owned by Seagate!!!

Unbeleivable!

I will be responding, again, to this! The company installs Seagate drives into their own enclosures and they have no idea what Seagate model hard drive is being installed inside?

Come On!?..

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Answer 6

den.thed

Level 10

90,670 points

Mar 4, 2016 9:22 AM in response to Timothy Fink

That is exactly why I use a (multiple backup, multiple drive strategy) for all drives (HDD,SSD) that run from or store data on.

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Answer 7

Csound1

Level 9

60,063 points

Mar 4, 2016 9:26 AM in response to Timothy Fink

DAT tape is a long term maintenance load nightmare, good luck with that.

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Answer 8

dwb

Level 7

33,208 points

Mar 4, 2016 10:43 AM in response to MichelPM

Actually I believe this. Some years ago I bid on and won a palette of computer peripherals. For $150 I got 3 excellent LCDs which is why I bid. Among other things I also got 20 some Maxtor external drives, all the same size all the same model externally. Internally the enclosures not only didn’t all have the same mode drivel, they weren’t even all Maxtor drives. One explanation is that they were opened and replaced by the university but the enclosures were so poorly constructed half the ribbons ribbons separated from the logic board when I opened the case that I doubt it.

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Answer 9

babowa

Level 9

78,556 points

Mar 4, 2016 10:56 AM in response to MichelPM

Having just dealt with a problem that I thought was Apple's - and in a way it was - and turned into a problem with a particular chipset used in the external enclosures, I'd say the chipset used is an extremely important factor in deciding on any external. My vote goes to OWC who had to change the chipsets twice because Apple bunked the FW and USB3 connection to that chipset with an OS update. OWC was gracious enough to replace two of my externals with different chipsets because of it. The problem: any time I had an external plugged in and the iMac went to sleep, it refused to wake: it was completely dead. 100% reproduceable. The only way to resurrect it (nothing worked) was to unplug it and plug it back in (essentially doing an SMC reset).

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Answer 10

MichelPM Author

Level 10

81,525 points

Mar 4, 2016 11:38 AM in response to babowa

I contacted OWC and I found out that they use higher end HGST (formerly Hitachi) and Toshiba hard drives in their 2-6 TB Mercury Elite Pro enclosures.

So, that was good to learn.

In their Mercury Elite Pro 1 TB models, they use the Seagate ST somethng style/model drives that are one level higher than what Apple installs as standard in some Mac models when Apple isn't using Samsung branded hard drives inside Macs.

So, good info all around.

LaCie got back ti me when I ask (demanded) more info on there drives before I considered makng another drive purchase and while the customer service rep couldn't pin down the exact Seagate line/type they use in there D2 enclosures, he did confirm through another LaCie rep that they are using Seagate's higher spec'd drives and that they should last some time over the 5 year mark, but that they, obviously, cannot guarantee or commit to that specification.

He said the reliabilty of the Seagate drives installed in the LaCie enclosures have been reviewed/reported/tested to be of low instance of early failures.

That's as much info he would commit to. He could not quote me or confirm any figures or pecentages

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