<font color=skyblue>I've been told by friends in the business of keeping PCs running that either Western Digital or Seagate is the way to go. There are none else that they trust. My W.D. (40Gig) has been running now for three or four years. I need a larger one, but money is tight.</font>

[ 11-10-2005, 12:54 AM: Message edited by: Larry_OHF ]

Rarely has had issues with Maxtors in the past. I have used both Seagate and Western Digital in the past, but currently I place my faith in Maxtor. Mainly as the one time I had one crash on me, my friend ran all the Maxtor tests on it before I made my phone call. Within days, I had my brand new one sent to me and the old one I shipped back in the box the new HDD was wired to me in. Now that was service I couldn't dream of getting before. Of course, if Seagate has improved themselves from when I last possessed one (around 1998 - 2000) then I wouldn't mind giving them another run. However, around here its Canadian beer, Maxtor HDDs, and Japanese animation.

There are times when each company has put out dud's, so don't take a few reports as indication that their entire lineup is bad... just avoid those units.

I probably have 40% WD/40% Maxtor/15% Seagate. I've got somewhere between 4 and 5 TB including a 1TB Maxtor IDE array, a 1.2TB WD SATA array, a 1TB NAS Maxtor SATA array, and a 300GB Seagate U320 15k SCSI array... which is CRAZY fast.

I've got drives that are 10 years old and still running, I've also had drives fail in less than a year. The key with hard drives is DON'T TRUST EM!

In the USA, last i read anyway, WD is the top selling HDD. In Astralia its Seagate.

Ive had lots of Seagates and only a few WDs. All have been good so at this point I would say the 2 biggest factors in namebrand purchasing is price and personal preferance (price influencing preferance of course.)

Good to see you back, mate ;)