Up until a few months ago, I was also a very vocal advocate of WD drives. However, I think their run as the king of HD manufacturers may be coming to an end. First they cut down the standard warranty on a majority of their drives from 3 years to 1 year, then they slowly but surely increase their cost per megabyte (relative to other manufacturers) to the point where the "bang for the buck" they used to have is completely gone. They still sit at or near the top in terms of performance at a given price point, but it's such a shallow edge that it's no longer worth it when you can get a significantly larger drive from Samsung or Hitachi. Furthermore, I had one of my WD 205BA's start emitting a loud grinding noise recently (even louder than WD drives are already), suggesting it's on its last leg (though it tests out fine.)

So recently, when I put together my RAID5 array on my Linux file server, I started out looking at WD drives, but found that Samsung had a model that was just as fast, MUCH quieter, and cheaper (unless you factor in WD rebates which are only one per household.) I ended up getting 4 Samsung SP1604Ns instead. I still think WD makes some good drives, but I don't think the quality and service is quite what it used to be, and the fact that they refuse to do anything about reducing noise has me wondering if I'll ever look at WD again. Even if noise wasn't a factor, I'm still not sure WD is at the top of the heap anymore.

But, yeah, Maxtor still sucks.