I recently cancelled my Dropbox subscription, and will now be running local backups instead. For that purpose I need an external hard drive.
It seems most companies (Western Digital, Kingston, Seagate) are American, with Japanese Toshiba occasionally showing up in my search results.
Does anyone know of/have any experience with European storage manufacturers? If not I guess Toshiba will have to do. :)
Europe and manufacturing in one sentence? That is not possible!
I don’t think there are any European companies manufacturing HDDs themselves. Some, for example German Intenso, sell HDDs under their name, but the actual manufacturer will be a different one. For SSDs, there’s Swissbit and Goodram.
Does Goodram really produce in Europe? I highly doubt that…
Yes, the company is called Wilk Elektronik and their production facility is in Łaziska Górne, Poland, which they’ve also recently expanded to focus on more products aside from RAM modules. Not every single component in their SSDs will come from Europe, but the final production is European.
Wow, good to hear that!
Does anyone know who produces the HDDs and SSDs for Intenso? But good to know Swissbit and Goodram are european.
Thanks! I’m not entirely set on whether I’ll get HDD or SSD (I only need a couple of TB), so I’ll check them out.
Goodram seems to be the best option for external hard drives, as Swissbit seems to lean more towards smaller form factors. Thanks!
Remember, a local backup isn’t a real backup. I have setup a storage system with my brother. He stores his stuff on my server and I store my stuff on his. All encrypted and synced daily, plus we do periodic verify to prevent bit rot. When we need expansion we pool our money and both expand our servers the same amount.
Not everyone has a backup brother.
Sadge :(
Yeah, I’m planning to keep a second backup in the office once I’ve figured it out at home. I think that should be sufficient. Will still keep it local in a networking sense, but I’m walking back and forth with my laptop.
I’m not aware of any EU companies that actually manufacture drives. Just a few like Synology who rebadge JP made drives.
Yeah, I guess avoiding the US is probably the best I can do here.
Maybe Verbatim (edit: and Synology) could be a good option - they’re Taiwanese, so at least it would somewhat align with my geopolitical positioning. :)
I was dealing with similar thing not long ago. Bought 3 Toshiba drives and so far I am happy with them.
All European fediverse instance admins should look at this!
It seems we don’t really produce HDDs in Europe, which is still the cheapest storage for large amounts of data. But at least it’s good to know that there are alternatives out there!
I came to suggest HGST but apparently I’ve been living under a rock, it’s been sold to WD over a decade ago. And yes, I know Hitachi is not European. Brand name is still around and the drives seem to be pretty decent, but they (too) are owned by US company and manufactured in China/Thailand.
