I have a MacPro3,1 (early2008) with three hard drives. I'm thinking of adding a fourth. Last time I bought new drives, old hands at this forum suggested Hitachi. I bought two of them and they have been flawless for a couple of years.

I just went to OWC's web site. They only have one 3.5" Hitachi and it's a "factory new." Is Hitachi still a preferred brand? I want a drive with a 5 year warranty if it's available.

Hitachi is part of Western Digital now. They and Seagate are the two biggest and make good products. I've always had good luck with Samsung.

Thank you. It looks like it's a dynamic industry with constant change.

In reality, with all the consolidation in the industry and with the fact that the same manufacturer may make different hard drives on different assembly lines, there's no such thing as a "preferred brand" any more. The Hitachi drive you buy will actually be made in a Western Digital factory, alongside other Western Digital drives that are different capacities and may have radically different designs. It's entirely possible for a manufacturer to make one line of drives that has terrible reliability and a second that has great reliability, because two models from the same manufacturer may have quite different internal design and be manufactured in entirely separate locations.

It's a bit of a crapshoot, really. I get the cheapest drives I can find with good warranties, and keep good backups.

Tacit, that is a very concentrated bit of wisdom. Thank you.

To add to what Tacit said, when you are looking at external drives the bridge chips used in the enclosure are at least as important as the drive mechanism. Western Digital brand external drives have a checkered history with Apple because of the various bridge chips they have used. Other World Computing has so far stuck with the various Oxford bridge chips and those have been reliably Apple compatible.

Tacit's emphasis above on price and warranty is good practice, but it is ideally complemented by real-life performance reports. Unfortunately, these are fairly rare or not easy to come by. As it happens, just the other day a blog maintained by Backblaze (an online backup provider) published an article on their experience with over 25,000 of consumer-grade hard drives: What Hard Drive Should I Buy? In Backblaze's setups, certain Hitachi and Western Digital drive models lead the pack. But by all means, read the entire article and find out why.

Previous Backblaze blog articles on drive reliability of consumer vs. enterprise-grade hard drives include Enterprise Drives: Fact or Fiction? (only the warranty lasts longer, the drives don't), and How long do disk drives last? nicely complement the drive choice article. Note that no explicit mention is made of the drives' interface logic, but (to the extent that is relevant) that may be deduced from the model numbers provided.

Thanks for the referral to Backblaze articles. I also read the comments which were quite a few. I came away feeling that there is considerable controversy, but that Hitachi was highly favored except for price. Since I am not nearly as price sensitive as Backblaze has to be, I'm still leaning toward that brand if I can find it labeled as Hitachi.

Backblaze itself is new to me. They seem to offer the "cloud" I have been hoping for. I refuse to use iCloud because it caters to Apple brand applications. I continue to use Microsoft Office for the Mac because Excel is vital to many of my projects. Numbers just can't match Excel's iteration. Numbers has a form of iteration, but it isn't the automatic thing that Excel has. iCloud invites limited use of "other" applications' documents, but I'm leery of it whereas Backblaze advertises "the only online backup service that doesn't need you to pick folders and filetypes." That''s what I had hoped iCloud would be. I'm turned off by some of Apple's attempts to force me to use Apple brand products when another brand is better suited to my needs.