the reason, at least in what concerns our company, has more to do with seagate than with wd...

We have totally ditched seagate since the shit hit the fan at the end of 08/start of 09 - the now (in)famous firmware error (followed by the bad firmware update they released) that affects nearly all drives between 500 gb and 1,5 tb manufactured roughly since 2007 until Dec 2008 (as far as i know).....

We were hit ourselves by it: in the space of a couple of weeks at the end of 2008 we lost 6 drives of 1TB each and 4 drives of 500gb each , and since those particular drives contained sensitive information we couldn't even send them back for warranty / external data recovery. We were lucky to have backups, otherwise if we had called a data recovery company to do the data recovery on-site the costs would have been far greater.

The platters for all those drives, after degaussing for security, are now used as wall decorations / mirrors all around our office... pretty damn expensive mirrors for seagate.

So, since the beginning of January, we only purchased WD and Samsung drives and until this week those amount to about 40 drives, on average each being 1TB, and none of them were Seagate drives... it is now a joke among the IT guys here to call those affected drives as made by shitgate,