I was a long time Seagate only buyer, until they took the poison pill known as "Maxtor"

Probably just the NSA placing a few orders. They must be running out of space fast.

They bought the company and the name. They stopped using the Maxtor drives aaaages ago. Buy Maxtor, you will get a Seagate drive.

I've been let down in the past by IBM (4 bad 30GB drives), Maxtor (4 bad 80GB drives), Seagate (1 bad 60GB and 2 bad 100GB drives, I never bothered trying the reconditioned replacements from previous experience with IBM and Maxtor), and Samsung (6 bad 750GB drives, not even bothered claiming under warranty due to previous poor recons). I'm currently a WD bloke and so far, touch wood, they seem to be the most reliable brand available. Their Green Raid Edition drives are proving to be rather good.

I've been let down by every HD manufacturer you've mentioned and mostly by WD. I've only stuck with Seagate so long because they've had the lowest failure rate of all the drives I've personally used. (touch wood, my 1TB Seagate drive that was supposed to die hasn't yet.)

But I'm not going to jump ship to WD. I have no proof to support this but I believe that HD reliability is a cycle that most manufacturers go through. Karma, bad design, crap factories, etc ... all catch up at one point or another.

The reason the recession is going to end for all HD manufacturers is because no consumer is going to trust any one manufacturer again and will simply buy two drives (from competing manufacturers hopefully) to be prepared for the inevitable.

I've never liked Seagate, due to high failure rates, and even more so since they took over Maxtor. I've NEVER had a Western Digital hard drive fail, compared to about 25 Seagate/Maxtor ones, and that's NOT including customer ones. The Maxtor 2F0L0 20GB drives were known to be crap, I had bucketloads of them die, either electronically, or because of bearing failure. They only had 2 platters, were thin and quiet, but failure prone.

As far as I'm concerned, from my experience (I'm a repair company owner), Western Digital and Hitachi are my top two, and the only ones that go in any of my machines or company servers. When I stick a WD in a computer, I am assured that it isn't going to come back for HD replacement, only maintenance and regular backup, as my customers entrust me to do backups for them on site.

If WD start to sell SSD's mainstream, and eventually as cheaply as their mechanical drives, I won't hesitate to use them. Their recent pricing of their new 1TB 2.5" drive at around $179 has surprised me, too.