External drives - how many brands are there really?

[akiranyo]

Greetings.
I needed to backup a few hundred DVD's, so in 2013 I eventually purchased 3x 1TB drives.
ADATA NH13, ADATA HC630 and Silicon Power A15.

We have 3 big PC shops in our country and seems like each of them prefers one of the "cheaper" brands which are ADATA, Silicon Power and Intenso respectively. Of course each of them holds also the two giants WD and Seagate, and in smaller ammounts you find also Verbatim, Lacie, Toshiba, Hitachi and Sony.
Have seen a video of a dismantled ADATA NH13 and a Silicon Power A15 on YouTube, and both drives where actually Samsung.
Just being curious I contacted the ADATA support center about the remaining HC630.
I lold hard on their answer:
"Thank you for supporting ADATA products.
Actually we do use different brands of HDD on our HC630 External Hard Drive.
The brand of HDD’s we do use are: Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung and Hitachi.
You should find one of the above brand HDD on the HC630 External Hard Drive."

Whoever gives a better price, heh?

So I assume mechanical drives need plants with some serious technology to produce, cause ADATA seems being able to produce SSD drives on other hand.
My question would be that except WD, Seagate, Samsung and Hitachi which I know, which brands are using own external drives?
I start to assume that Verbatim will be something else under the cover as well.

 

[volksman]

Just an FYI - but ADATA is a huge, huge company. They are primarily in the memory production business (DDR Ram, NAND Flash, etc), so you may think they are small, but they are many times larger than most brands you know of.

I like WD branded external drives, but that is from nothing more than no bad experiences to speak of. Lacie's rugged (the orange ones) I have had mixed results with. Some lasted for freaking ever, some failed in the first week. I have also had decent results with G-Raid products - but that is another price bracket.