External Hard Drives - What to avoid?

WorkerBee2015 · Feb 14, 2015

Can't speak to SSDs but I think actual HD Makers boil down to WD, Seagate, and Fujitsu.

HGST is owned and now part of WD. Part of HGST went into Fujitsu before it got picked up by WD. Seagate as acquired tons and tons of companies. I don't think this applies to SSDs, just drives.

Regarding SSDs, companies are cropping up like weeds. Here's a link to a newegg page. Scroll through it and see how many brands you've never heard of:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...77&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=30

I would be really careful buying anything that may be a repackage job from China. Apparently some reputable manufacturers sell their defective units to companies that theoretically want to strip them for parts but what they do is repackage them, create a new company, start unloading the junk as fast as possible, then when the complaints come in the companies just disappear.

TheBSDGuy · Feb 14, 2015

That chart's fine for standalone drives, but there are also a lot of providers, like LaCie that obviously don't show up in such a list because you don't really know what drive's they're putting in their enclosures. A few years ago we ordered a number of external drives and when they inevitably started to fail we opened some up to pull the drives. The actual hard drives were not the same. For example in one there was a Seagate, in another there was an Hitachi. I guess as long as the drive met the specs of the product, price and availability were probably the determining factors as to what went into which unit.

If possible, it might be a good idea to find out what type of drive is inside an enclosure if it's coming from a re-packager.

matreya · Feb 14, 2015

TheBSDGuy said:
...like LaCie that obviously don't show up in such a list because you don't really know what drive's they're putting in their enclosures.

Seagate owns LaCie now for the last few years so you can count on them all having seagate drives in them now.

OldGuyTom · Feb 15, 2015

I'm surprised Seagate did that poorly. I read so much bad stuff about WDs I would have thought those statistics would be reversed.

BradHatter · Feb 16, 2015

OldGuyTom said:
I'm surprised Seagate did that poorly. I read so much bad stuff about WDs I would have thought those statistics would be reversed.

Western Digital probably outsells Seagate, and they have a large business selling replacement drives. The reason you might here more about WD is because there are more of them.

I'll be honest though. Even though I posted that chart, I find it a little hard to believe. Unless Seagate had one line that was a real lemon, that figure would indicate almost imminent doom for a fair number of users right out of the box with a lot more following 12 months later. I really can't see Seagate being that bad.

g4cube · Feb 17, 2015

BradHatter said:
Western Digital probably outsells Seagate, and they have a large business selling replacement drives. The reason you might here more about WD is because there are more of them.

I'll be honest though. Even though I posted that chart, I find it a little hard to believe. Unless Seagate had one line that was a real lemon, that figure would indicate almost imminent doom for a fair number of users right out of the box with a lot more following 12 months later. I really can't see Seagate being that bad.

recent market share figures indicate 45% for WD, 43% for Seagate, with the remaining going to Toshiba.

Seagate's primary business is enterprise and to computer OEMs; WD has been trying to build a stronger enterprise business, hence their merger with HGST.

Branded retail products, including bare drives sold at retail, as offered by WD and Seagate are a small portion of their business. Enterprise prices and margins are typically higher than for retail consumer drives.

Finally both WD and Seagate sell millions of drives each year.

As for those Backblaze reports, certainly a data point. Repurposing consumer drives for enterprise applications might be skewing the data.

BradHatter · Feb 19, 2015

I hear that some of the large Seagate external hard drives like to park their heads a lot to save energy. Apparently when it does so it makes a clicking sound which is similar to the noise a drive makes when it's failing. Anyone have any experience with this? I wish I had the link where I read that but I don't. I'd also have to wonder if that wouldn't skew the test results in the chart upwards with false returns.

B-Eugen · Feb 19, 2015

BradHatter said:
I hear that some of the large Seagate external hard drives like to park their heads a lot to save energy. Apparently when it does so it makes a clicking sound which is similar to the noise a drive makes when it's failing. Anyone have any experience with this? I wish I had the link where I read that but I don't. I'd also have to wonder if that wouldn't skew the test results in the chart upwards with false returns.

Clicking usually indicates that the drive is failing. If they're stupid enough to manufacture a drive that deliberately makes noises that sound like the drive is failing they ought to have their heads examined.

ZVH · Feb 22, 2015

There are some posts on YouTube with people getting rid of the clicking by putting insulation on some of the circuitry inside the drive housing. In that case is sounds to me like the USB cable is intermittently shorting to the case, the drive resets, and "CLICK". If true it's a quality control problem for sure, but IMHO good reason to return the drive if new.

BradHatter · Feb 23, 2015

ZVH said:
There are some posts on YouTube with people getting rid of the clicking by putting insulation on some of the circuitry inside the drive housing. In that case is sounds to me like the USB cable is intermittently shorting to the case, the drive resets, and "CLICK". If true it's a quality control problem for sure, but IMHO good reason to return the drive if new.

If it's causing the drive to reset or in essence power off I'd think the end result would tend to that the drive would disappear and the dialog stating the drive ejected improperly would pop up. Maybe this is a problem too, but I never heard of it. Maybe the problem is with a data line intermittently shorting, but I'd think the system would just retry and keep retrying to send the data, and it shouldn't cause a clicking sound.

WorkerBee2015 · Feb 26, 2015

A drive that needs servicing right out of the box is probably not a drive worth owning!

If the clicking noise is by design, I have to agree, Seagate should have their heads examined.

MacRobert10 · Feb 28, 2015

So what conclusion can be reached so far? All I really see is that big Seagate drives in the terabyte range appear to be unreliable, and some of the WD externals come with bad cables. No one has really even mentioned compatibility problems, but I know for a fact that some people are having problems with some USB units and drive ejection. Surely drives exhibiting these qualify as problems, right?

g4cube · Feb 28, 2015

Why not limit choices to drives available at Apple online and retail stores?

Surely, Apple would not be selling drives with problems, right?

Sure, prices might be higher, but you could compare same models to other online stores.

matreya · Feb 28, 2015

MacRobert10 said:
No one has really even mentioned compatibility problems, but I know for a fact that some people are having problems with some USB units and drive ejection. Surely drives exhibiting these qualify as problems, right?

Sure, some people are having drive ejection problems with USB drives, but it's incredibly hard to diagnose. It would not surprise me if half the people complaining have elcheapo USB hubs connected to their Macs.

I mainly use Thunderbolt drives, with a smattering of USB3 portable drives, and I've experienced ZERO drive ejection problems. Maybe I'm just lucky, or maybe I chose the right drive enclosures AND bought quality bare hard drives for them, instead of buying the cheap external drives made by Seagate and WD..

ZVH · Feb 28, 2015

matreya said:
Sure, some people are having drive ejection problems with USB drives, but it's incredibly hard to diagnose. It would not surprise me if half the people complaining have elcheapo USB hubs connected to their Macs.

Actually, believe it or not, putting a USB hub in between the offending drive and the system is apparently one of the "solutions" some people at the Genius bars are offering up as "fixes" to this problem.

I think it's properly called an OS bug.

Donoban · Feb 28, 2015

Ray2 said:
About a month ago I started a thread on what externals do work with newer Mac's. The last time I looked, there was one response and that was a usb2 response.

My experience is the entire usb3 standard is a mess as well as Apple's implementation of sleep mode. I've been through 4 different usb3 enclosures, installed a variety of Hitachi's and Samsung's I know work just fine in 3 of them, and all were problematic. Improper ejects with sleep, spontaneous ejects, can't be mounted without a reboot, don't show up in DU, wifi issues. On the same MacBook Air, FireWire drives operate just fine.

This is another thread where there's a conspicuous absence of people with late model Mac's and no problems with external usb3 drives.

For now, I've decided to go with large ssd internals and keep using my old FireWire drives. Cheaper and I have speed where I want it.

I'm more than welcome to hear some specific success stories with specific current gen Mac's and specific usb3 externals. Stories that don't require crippling sleep mode or installing software to eject drives as OSX appears unable to.

Ray2 baby! Here I was thinking it was just my system that had issues.

I was running a WD USB 3 drive (self powered) without issue. I just upgrade to a LaCiE 4tb Porsche designed drive and I've had nothing but random disconnects/panic crashes since.

I'm curious to hear about using a USB hub as a solution. I will have to try it out. Can someone recommend a decent USB 3 hub?

I have a 2012 Mac Mini.

matreya · Mar 1, 2015

Donoban said:
I'm curious to hear about using a USB hub as a solution. I will have to try it out. Can someone recommend a decent USB 3 hub?

I have a 2012 Mac Mini.

I have been using this USB3 hub for 2 years without any drive ejection issues:

http://smile.amazon.com/Kanex-4-Port-SuperSpeed-Adapter-USB3HUB4X/dp/B00AIPE7IS/

theSeb · Mar 1, 2015

BradHatter said:
Considering HDs, I assume externals have the same brand disk in them as their manufacturer. With that in mind, you might find this interesting:

Image

The source of the article is InfoWorld, here's a link to that article:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/28...n-digital-hgst-most-reliable-hard-drives.html

This particular "research" is fraught with issues.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/17/backblaze_how_not_to_evaluate_disk_reliability/

B-Eugen · Mar 2, 2015

theSeb said:
This particular "research" is fraught with issues.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/17/backblaze_how_not_to_evaluate_disk_reliability/

I agree. He made a reference to that same graph in another link some time ago and I doubted it then, now I doubt it more. If Seagate's failure rate was that high they would have been out of business a long time ago. I've seen other reliability graphs and it should surprise no one, but there were quality variations in drive manufactures, but nothing like "these guys have 4 or 5 percent but Seagate has 40%."

As an FYI, IMHO some of these people writing tech articles on web sites have no idea what they're doing. Some do, like Topher Kessler, but many don't have a clue.

matreya · Mar 2, 2015

Regardless of whether Backblaze's results are skewed, Seagate chose to reduce their warranty on their Desktop drives to 1 year, which doesn't give me much confidence in their product.

BradHatter · Mar 3, 2015

The graph I posted was from InfoWorld which I assumed was a credible source. If you see one of my posts above even I found the high Seagate failure rate a little questionable. I updated the post with a notation in bold so people might question it if needed.

I also decided to take a look/see on some drive ejection/sleep issues and here's what I've observed (note: Observered.not proven):

The problems seem to have started on Mountain Lion
The problems aren't necessarily fixed on any OS X version since
The problems seem to be with USB only, both USB 2 and USB 3, but they seem to be worse on USB 3

Possible things that may help:

Disable the energy saving option to put the drive to sleep when possible
Insert a USB hub between the external drive and the computer

That's what I've got so far. Too bad they killed off Firewire. Everything I see that's thunderbolt costs a fortune and it's not easy to come by, meaning I can't go down to the local computer store and expect to find something there.

TheBSDGuy · Mar 4, 2015

B-Eugen said:
As an FYI, IMHO some of these people writing tech articles on web sites have no idea what they're doing. Some do, like Topher Kessler, but many don't have a clue.

Couldn't agree more. Read some of the comments some people write about the content of the articles before taking them seriously.

BradHatter · Mar 5, 2015

Has anyone had any problems with any Firewire drives at all? I see problems with USB but I don't think I've read about any with Firewire, which I guess is now a dead technology.

thedeske · Mar 5, 2015

BradHatter said:
Has anyone had any problems with any Firewire drives at all? I see problems with USB but I don't think I've read about any with Firewire, which I guess is now a dead technology.

Firewire's not dead if you need it

My last few firewire 800 enclosures were reliable, but I had a few deadskis along the way with 400 & 800. There is no magic bullet on a drive type or interface.

Unlike many here, I've had great success with USB3, but I tend to choose strong enclosures (Caldigit, Firmtek) but there's always a chance your drive (no matter how good the rep) will be a bad unit. SSD or HD - makes no difference in the lottery of huge numbers these days.

Remember, you only hear about the bad luck units on the net. The good ones are the majority and not worth reporting on strings like these

BradHatter · Mar 6, 2015

I've never had any problems with Firewire drives at all. I can attest to the ejection problem, at least on Mavericks, with USB 2.0 drives.

External Hard Drives - What to avoid?

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