[quote name='JamesJoyce']Dude, I think you're a little out of touch. Seagate took over Samsung's HDDs branch, and Western Digital took over Hitachi's HDD production. Maxtor was acquired by Seagate about a decade ago.
So there are only 2 big players left: WD and Seagate. Of those two I prefer WD, due to their awesome warranty: if you have a drive problem, they'll send you a replacement drive before you have to ship the bad one. So if it's just a case of bad sectors, you can just copy over to the new drive, and send the old one back. This is extremely useful imho.
All that being said, I would heavily advise against buying bare internal drives from Amazon. Amazon does not understand that HDDs are fragile and ship them like books, with no padding. So I had a few DOAs, and of the ones that work, I was really afraid about shortened lifespans due to the rough ride.
TL;DR: Imho WD>Seagate, and never buy internal HDDs at Amazon![/QUOTE]
QFT. I was about to say this after he mentioned hes a computer tech. Ive been a tech for around the same time, moving on to networking with a Cisco CCNA.
Every maxtor you buy is now a seagate. Between seagate and WD, go WD all day long. Even though they have the market share, they still have a lower fail rate than a seagate. I just had an issue with a seagate free agent usb losing its boot sector. Man what a pain it was to repair compared to a WD. Out of all the failed drives i have waiting to recycle right now, its around a 70/30 split with seagate taking the higher number. Personally, ive had 1 WD drive fail (a my book 3tb), and had 5 seagates/maxtors go in the last year alone (3 usb, 2 internals).