Chinese Hard Drives

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Thu Nov 29, 2012 7:13 pm

Well, I just got my 3TB hard drive & was surprised to see "Made in China" on it. I've only ever seen them made in Thailand until now. I'm worried about it.

DaMaN · Post by **DaMaN** » Thu Nov 29, 2012 7:36 pm

Oh no...

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Thu Nov 29, 2012 7:44 pm

Almost everything's now made in China. Why worry?

renovation · Post by **renovation** » Thu Nov 29, 2012 8:05 pm

ya its sad but wonder what it cost to build American hard drive's compared to those built in china or Thailand. the problem is not so much were there built. the problem is were not willing to pay the extra for American /North American made products

was just shopping with the wife and try buying all your christmas presents American made and stay with in a set budget

not even try and find what your looking for in the stores American made . im seeing some stuff that says assembled in USA. but made with IMPORTED parts. but try finding made and assembled in the United States its very hard.
Hell even Apple and Orange juice you need to read the lable to make sure its made from 100% American juice !

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Thu Nov 29, 2012 8:28 pm

Almost everything's now made in China. Why worry?

Because almost everything that I've ever had that was made in China failed a miserable death. Give me Korea or Taiwan any day over Chinese.

Executioner · Post by **Executioner** » Thu Nov 29, 2012 11:06 pm

normalicy wrote:Because almost everything that I've ever had that was made in China failed a miserable death. Give me Korea or Taiwan any day over Chinese.

aid:

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Fri Nov 30, 2012 7:41 am

Apple products are made in China and to date, I have yet to have ONE minor issue with one of mine.

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Sat Dec 01, 2012 2:24 am

They are an exception rather than the rule. Mostly due to massive quality control on Apple's part. That said, I've repaired more than a fair share of apple hardware (which is both very hard to work on & rather expensive for parts).

Koo Koo Mouse · Post by **Koo Koo Mouse** » Sat Dec 01, 2012 12:40 pm

I've never seen a HD made in China. I'd be worried too. Hope it turns out ok for ya Norm.

GuardianAsher · Post by **GuardianAsher** » Sat Dec 01, 2012 1:45 pm

Honestly, with the way hard drive quality control from ANY manufacturer has been for the past year or so, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the Chinese hard drives were of higher quality at this point.

Used to love Seagate... then they started making crap. Turned back to WD after several years of being a Seagate only fan, and they're okay.. Black edition hard drives are the only ones with 5 years warranty though. Samsung was making great hard drives, then they got bought out by Seagate and quality slipped. Now we have... what, HGST, Hitachi, which was bought out by Western Digital... don't even know if Toshiba makes their own drives anymore, either.

ZYFER · Post by **ZYFER** » Sat Dec 01, 2012 6:56 pm

Is it an external? I could see the enclosure part Made in China, but the physical hard drive inside might not be. From my experiences, quality can greatly vary. Many of cases, Chinese products being superior to American products. Though not far apart, and even though China still like to claim it as its own, products from Taiwan are almost always of better quality then products from China.

Toshiba does still make their own hard drives, they acquired Fujitsu's hard drive division some time back. There was a time when they were not including them in their laptops due to the shortage. They had to just use whatever they could get a hold of at the time.

I'd certainly agree with the Seagate thought as well. Their quality has slipped greatly. The well talked about issue with the 1.5TB drives and the bad firmware issues surrounding it. Their performance has kind of gone down the tube too. The only decent drives they have are the Momentus XT series.

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Sat Dec 01, 2012 7:41 pm

It's a Seagate ST3000DM001 internal drive. And yeah, the reason I mentioned this is due to the fact that I've never seen a spinning hard drive made in China either.

Seagate has definitely started a steady decline in reliability. It's sad to watch. It's funny, I've rotated from so many brands that it's almost a history of computers. I started with Conner, then Quantum, then IBM, then Western Digital, then Seagate, then Samsung. It always seemed that by the time I needed a new drive, there was another brand. I'm currently running Samsungs in my server, and Patriot, Hitachi, & Seagate in my main rig.

I'm a bit disturbed by the Chinese Seagate already. I use Active@ Hard Disk Monitor to check on my drive smart statuses & the "Health Status" is already at 59% due to the Raw read error rate. I have done a full scan disk on it & it's all checked out for now. However my year & a half old Hitachi's are still at 66% with a perfect Raw read error rate (held back by spinup time & seek performance).

Shadow250 · Post by **Shadow250** » Sun Dec 02, 2012 9:26 am

i just sent a hitachi 2 tb back with a maxed reallocated sector count. i put movies on it and it was carefully stored on the shelf. with spinrite i was able to recover all but 3 movies. i have no idea why it died sitting on the shelf in an a/s bag

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sun Dec 02, 2012 10:51 am

Might have been a bad cable connection. It's not as bad with SATA as it was with IDE but cable errors are still a big culprit in file system corruption. On my bench PC that I constantly temporarily connect client drives to, I religiously clean the connector. I do the same for the SATA USB dock I use. I also only use SATA cables with gold plated contacts. Any archive drives in storage I need to read I clean the contacts first (industrial contact cleaner).

Sadly, a lot of new high density drives have high relocation counts and it's considered normal. That's why I only use drive tech that's two generations old which is mature and stable. I just bought 3 1Tb drives for my new Unraid box. I am avoiding 2 and 3 Tb drives until the next gen comes out.

For clients I only buy 500Gb or 750Gb drives for workstations. I spinrite a new drive on level 2 to test it. If you get any relocation errors on a new 500Gb drive, its garbage IMHO. There's no excuse for it. I prefer 2 platter 1 or 1.5 Tb drives if you need more space because it's usually the same tech as older 500Gb drives.

ZYFER · Post by **ZYFER** » Sun Dec 02, 2012 6:27 pm

Agreed with the cables. In some cases, the latches get broken, and one might not notice it. The cables eventually start to slip out of place and then issues start to occur. Had a drive drop out of an array, was curious at why until I noticed the issue.

I think the only real reliable one to look at for 2TB+ might be Western Digital right now.

I've been with Seagate for awhile, but their quality has went from great to disgusting bad as of late.

Don't worry as one moves to SSD, there are plenty of more brands to go through! In my experience, it seems you need to have a backup for your backup.

Remember to take heat into consideration too. These drives as of late tend to run hotter than the past, and if you build a multiple drive system, keep it in mind as they can start dropping on you easy.

Also to note, I have a couple of Seagate laptop 7200 RPM drives which are pulls from an upgrade. Both of which are being outperformed by Toshiba and Hitachi 5400RPM models.