ek2lckd wrote:
there is such a hugh market for external drives that no company would risk their rep by marketing junk, it could put them out of business... therefore anyone of them safe to buy... IMHO Ed
Oh my, if only that were the case. Companies have been marketing unreliable products (junk) for years and are still in business. Case in point: Seagate marketed a 4TB drive a year or two ago that Backblaze had a 34% failure rate the first year, and they are one of the two major surviving HD companies. I could go on... except for rare bargains, you get what you pay for.
And even the best of companies have occasional failures - a few examples. Some companies fixed the issue regardless of warranty status and some did not. All are still in business and well regarded companies.
Seagate took back approximately a million Cheetah 7 FibreChannel drives for massive early failures.
GM, especially Cadillac, marketed a Diesel engine some years ago that was a POS and a dismal failure. Failure coverage after warranty expiration typically depended on the dealer.
Mercedes Benz built engines for several years that had an improperly heat treated intermediate shaft gear that only failed after ~60,000 miles that required hundreds of thousands of engines to need a $4,000-$6,000 repair. It was not covered under warranty and resulted in a class action lawsuit.
Porsche had a known intermediate shaft bearing failure that affected tens to hundreds of thousands of 911 engines. To Porsche’s credit, they repaired the engines for original owners, even after the warranty expired, but only covered subsequent owners for 25 % of this $5000-$10,000 fix.
Canon has a known ribbon cable failure on their MKI 24-105L lenses. To my knowledge, there was no recall or compensation for owners,
Nikon had a well known oil contamination issue on the D600. To their credit, the either repaired or replaced all of them.
I could go on...