It's also possible that Seagate is writing this off now because just about all companies are taking a bath. Bad results everywhere.

They have to write it down eventually but doing it now means their future results won't take that hit.

Just maybe.

Carrying large amounts of goodwill on the books has always seemed rather suspect, so I applaud all goodwill writeoffs. Beancounter logic says when you've wasted a few billion, you should hide it by recording a goodwill asset for as long as you dare. eg Microsoft - $12.5B of goodwill - 30% of net assets; Dell 40% of net assets; Dixons Stores Group - 130% of net assets; Apple - 1% of net assets.

"Surely someone somewhere can put all this together and come up with the definitive 'most reliable drive' manufacturer?"

I don't think so. I work at a computer surplus, and (other than the 40GB+ Deskstars which really did fail way to often) I haven't noticed a large trend. Some particular MODEL will be junk, I think either due to manufacturing problems or perhaps even firmware or design problems.. I don't know. But not the entire brand. Made the same time, some DriveCo model X will be utter crap, DriveCo model Y will be fantastically reliable. I haven't kept hard numbers, but it seems for some particular age drive brand X will be maybe 5-10% better than brand Y.... 6 months newer (or even 3 months) and they've swapped places. Basically one vendor might have a bad batch and that's enough to skew it.

"blah blah blah blah crap blah blah blah Maxtor"

Every time a storage manufacturer is mentioned in a Reg article it gets tons of comments about how crap their drives are. So far I've seen every major manufacturer of drives, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, etc... slammed to hell and back. It's always the same story, too: "When I worked "x" we replaced hundreds/thousands/millions of "x" drives". Either this means all hard discs from every manufacturer suck or IT professionals are a cold and bitter lot who are really mean to their equipment.

Maxtor drives* disappeared when Seagate bought them anyway... I always thought they'd bought them BECAUSE they were so crappy just so people would stop being sucked in by them.

* Only talking about the drives. Seagate continued selling external Maxtor cases with Seagate drives in them.