All HDD manufacturers have had product issues at some point in the last few years.

Look how many have lowered their warranty lengths.

Seagate seem to have inherited Maxtor's quality/reliability problems, which have been patchy.

I haven't bought a Seagate drive for years, as they always seemed to run hotter & noisier then others. Been sticking with Hitachi & WD. WD might not have a reputation for fast, but I've found them reliable.

Going to be 'the clear leader in storage devices' and to this end, they're sacking people?

Considering my space needs haven't changed much in the last few years what I care about most is reliability. The warrantly length decrease from a few years back worried me. When a harddrive dies, it's such a pain in the ass.

Of course, if a company makes a good hard drive, I won't need to buy one again until it breaks... and if it's a good hard drive, it shouldn't break.

Of course, I'm just talking for home use. Thankfully there's a business sector that requires new stuff all the time, and I assume, keeps these companies trying to make reliable equiptment.

Oh, the decisions we made last year were wrong.

So we're going to lay off a bunch of people that didn't have anything to say about our decisions and everything will be all right.

Oh, and we're going to make some more decisions. If we're wrong again, we'll just lay off another bunch of people that have nothing to do with these decisions, and everything will be all right.