Like the title says, I'm looking for a pre-buyout 2TB drive from Hitachi or Samsung, preferably Samsung though. Also, does anyone know the manufacture dates when production switched to the new companies?

I'm afraid I don't know the date, but if you look at the comments on Newegg you can see that all the current Samsung drives are being manufactured by Seagate. About a month or two ago I purchased five 2T external Samsung drives and after cracking the cases I found all were manufactured by Samsung. I don't know if any are still out there, but I think that may be your only bet.

 

I don't know the situation with Hitachi, because I haven't seen Hitachi drives at a good price in the last few months.

I'm afraid I don't know the date, but if you look at the comments on Newegg you can see that all the current Samsung drives are being manufactured by Seagate. About a month or two ago I purchased five 2T external Samsung drives and after cracking the cases I found all were manufactured by Samsung. I don't know if any are still out there, but I think that may be your only bet.

 

I don't know the situation with Hitachi, because I haven't seen Hitachi drives at a good price in the last few months.

 

I haven't seen anything at a good price since before the flood. I should've bought a pallet of them when I had the chance. Now they're overpriced, unreliable drives.

there probably are no pretakeover drives around other then the 4tb hitachis.

because of the flooding, the drive supply was already well depleted by the time production ceased.

 

lots of people and companies stocked up for personal supplies when new of both take over and floods hit.

^^ Do you know the last manufacture date for genuine Samsung/Hitachi drives?

I got a "Real" Hitachi 3TB drive from NCIXus recently.  Well no more than 2 months ago anyway.  By real I mean no WD serials and nothing on drive label.  It might have been manufactured after the buyout but it doesn't appear to have been changed in anyway by WD.