🚀 go-pugleaf

I am a firm believer that some drive manufacturers produce inferior
disk drive-units.

A close friend of mine, a mechanical engineer at Seagate, told me (two
years ago) that Seagate was using very questionable practices on its
high-density drive line.  They were taking drives that fail the
performance / reliability tests, and swapping parts between the
failing drives until they barely met spec, and then shipping them out
as high-quality drives.  This is something to do with mature
technology (10Mb, 20Mb) drives, but not technology that is pushing
limits, like the high-density drives.  In other words, "Two wrongs
make a right!"

Maybe Seagate has changed this practice by now.  They have always
had the lowest-cost drives in the industry, and you have to wonder,
why is the price so low?

I went for a Quantum-80 (internal) drive, because Quantum has ALWAYS
specialized in high-density (30+Mb) (14", 8", 5", 3.5", ...)  drives,
and is one of the oldest manufacturers in silicon valley.  I had
personal experience with 8" Quantum drives on Xerox 8010 workstations.
I bought mine from CMS, which means they wrote the ROM software for
it, and provided a floppy disk of software.  I would also recommend CDC,
since they are one of the oldest 3rd-party disk-drive makers ANYWHERE.
For a while, they were the biggest and most successful makers of
mainframe disk drives.  This track record is something to consider.

I'm not saying Quantum or CDC drives don't break, but I believe some
other manufacturers (Seagate) might give their customers more
headaches, on average.

Occasionally, an end-unit manufacturer screws up the driver software.
This happened a while back with the disk cache in Cirrus drives.  The
cache was not writing through regularly, and if your mac crashed you
would lose a lot of work.  I believe this problem has been corrected.

Don't buy solely on price.  Buy based on drive-unit manufacturer.  Buy
based on the end-unit manufacturer.  Buy based on access speed.  Look
at price, but don't make it your primary consideration!!!!!