Why they do not drop that IBM name, which had earned a horrible reputation, is quite beyond me.

I'll never buy one. No matter how many times they say they have fixed all the problems, I'll never touch it.

All drives suck when they go bad. Unfortunately, all drives eventually go bad.

It's true that in the past IBM got caught with a bad batch of drives but so have all the other manufacturers. IMO, it's cyclical and no matter which drive you get it's still a crap shoot as to if you will get a good one. Some are peaches and some are lemons.

I think I'll order a couple. One can never have too much drive space.

Amen to that.

Seagate experienced a major batch of returns after they lost control of the quality in their Chinese factory.

WD was once terrible, today I think they're really good. I got a bunch of their 640GB fast drives, and WD GreenPower drives are ideal for storing library stuff, saves a lot of heat and electricity.

I also bought another Hitachi drive, in spite of a past DOA.

Samsung Spinpoints are fine, though their drives aren't so quick.

All things considered - out of the thousands of hard drives I've gone through both at work and at home here are the rankings from best to worst:

1) Western Digital
2) Seagate
3) Conner
4) Fujitsu
5) Hitachi (almost as bad as Maxtors)

Way, way, way at the bottom: Maxtor (honestly there are probably worse drives but I can't think of any right now).

I'm sure there are some missing from my list. There are names I can't even remember.

Agree with Video777. Maxtor drives are total junk. In 2000 I bought 3 of them and two of them died very soon, and the other one didn't last much longer. I also had a Fujitsu that went bad, and even a Seagate. Since then, all my drives are Western Digital. I have four of them in my PC, another one in my wife's PC which is almost 5 years old, and still works fine.

One thing to consider though, is that I never turn off my computer or put it to sleep. It's obvious to me that computer components will fail when they change temperatures. If the computer is cold for hours and then it's turned on and starts heating up, metals dilate and then go back to normal when you turn it off. A few times won't do much damage, but doing that every day, I'm pretty sure it strains components a lot more.

I just bought a WD Caviar Black 1TB drive from Best Buy. $162. Of course I paid too much for it. I don't know why I buy stuff from them! Newegg has it for $120 & free shipping. Could have saved $50.

One thing to consider though, is that I never turn off my computer or put it to sleep. It's obvious to me that computer components will fail when they change temperatures. If the computer is cold for hours and then it's turned on and starts heating up, metals dilate and then go back to normal when you turn it off. A few times won't do much damage, but doing that every day, I'm pretty sure it strains components a lot more.

I have three WD drives. One is ~4/5 years old. computer on/off many times a day. Others are newer (maybe 2-3 years). All on/off many times a day. They survived a house fire. Covered in soot but still worked (in house fire, then in burnt out house for a week or so in December/january. ~10f outside. Then put right in to an eternal enclosure). All worked perfectly. Smelled, but worked. They're designed for that kind of thing. Just like dropping them won't kill them all the time. Odds are if a good drive dies it's worn out or bad part. I've never had a part for a computer (ever) die from old age. :) EVER. All have had something external happen to them (static, fall, voltage overload, etc).

But crappy design/manufacture = crappy drives no matter what. ~10 years ago I would of never bought a WD drive, now they're all I use. :)

Just bought a WD 1TB Sata 300 7200 RPM Caviar GreenPower for $97.99 just before Christmas, now $115.99 at Supermediastore

It is not getting cold that makes drives more likely to be unreliable or fail, it is getting too hot. I think that 95% of hard drive problems could be avoided simply by placing a £3 case fan in front of the drive bays. It makes such a huge difference to running temperatures.