External hard drives come in many shapes and sizes. From desktop behemoths to rugged portable drives, there are as many different hard drives as there are different people.
A fact that would surprise most is that on the inside of the fancy casings, there are only three possible options. Over two hundred companies have at one point made hard drives, but that number has been boiled down over time. Now only Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba are left in the race to hold all the world’s data.
Seagate and Western Digital are neck-in-neck in sales at about 40% each with Toshiba holding the rest. This changes the probability of what you will get when you buy a external hard drive. Two out of five drives will either have a Seagate or Western Digital drive, which begs the question of which is better. If you are a faithful fan of certain companies, you might be biased towards a particular drive.
Toshiba just has the experience of Fujitsu in its belt, compared to Western Digital, who can find its roots among IBM and Hitachi. Seagate, in this regard, might look like the better choice, pulling from eight different companies from DEC and Maxtor to Seagate.
According to the market at large, Seagate is the most reliable; personally, I prefer Western Digital. Truthfully, both brands are about equal. One could measure reliability company-wide, but whether or not the hard drive you buy will last all boils down to how well that particular drive was put together. So the choice of what matters on the inside is really up to the eye of the beholder. ‘
All that said, remember to back up your data!