thegst wrote:Seagate is where I differ on that outlook. My dad was the senior line engineer for the Seagate Anaheim fab from open to close....I was too young to take pictures as this was back in the 90's.
So these would have been, what, 800MB (yes, with an "M") drives destined for installation in somebody's Pentium 166, back when there were still about seven or eight discrete hard drive vendors?
I don't mean to be rude, but your experiences from back then, while doubtless real, have nothing to do with the current state of the hard drive market or its manufacturing technologies. A lot has changed in the intervening 15-20 years, starting with the fact that Seagate's Anaheim and Mexicali manufacturing facilities were closed way back in 2000, and their sins are dead and buried with them, since the capital equipment is obsolete and has long been recycled, the employees have since moved elsewhere, and the drives of that era are scrapped or sitting idle in some computer nerd's junk drawer. Nearly all of Seagate's hard drive manufacturing was consolidated in Ireland thereafter, and subsequently went to Southeast Asia and China, just like everybody else.
As of today, if you buy a hard disk drive on the open market, regardless of actual brand or configuration (internal, external, SATA, USB), one way or another it is either a Seagate or a Western Digital, manufactured and assembled in Asia, and using most of the same upstream supply chain vendors (Hutchinson, Nidec). The only other independent brand player in that market is Toshiba, which deals almost exclusively in OE contracts.
FWIW I have used drives from nearly all of the major vendors since the late 1990s and still have more than a half dozen functional Seagates ranging from 80GB to 500GB, including at least four from a bulk RMA lot that were probably recertified but haven't caused any trouble.