My first hard drives were Connor hard drives. They gave me a lot of grief since two of three drives died after some time of use. Then Seagate bought Connor and I figured, let's give them a try. Bad idea. Another dead drive, but to be honest, a couple of good drives as well (medalist series). So then I tried Maxtor. Worst idea yet. EVERY Maxtor drive I've ever owned failed on me. Then Seagate bought Maxtor. And I started having problems with Seagate (there must be some red line here). Back then, WD was always a bit more expensive than the other brands and I was a poor student, so I still thought with my wallet. But then I thought, more expensive or not, I'll buy a few of those Caviar drives. Best choice yet. I've never had ANY WD drive fail on me. Even though they were a bit more expensive than their competitors (and usually still are, of only a couple of euro!), I thought they and my data were well worth it.

I've stayed loyal to the brand up until Samsung started making hard drives and with the F1 drive created a harddisk that was hard to ignore: it was faster, ran cooler and was cheaper than any competing brand. AND they turned out to be excellent drives! I now own 6 of them and none have failed me yet, even though they gave me some problems at first (but that turned out to be the fault of some crappy external enclosure chipset). So since then I've bought Samsung, mainly because they offer so much value for money. But I still love WD too and for this reason I've bought a Velociraptor drive to use as my primary HD last year.

That's my story... I'm sure others have different experiences, but many of my friends have the same. Maxtor is the absolute worst. Then Seagate. I've never touched Hitachi since their drives already had problems in the days they were still called IBM. (mainly heat issues and that irrirating creeping sound every so many minutes when the hard drives parked their heads - it seems they never got their act together from what I've read)

I'm not saying WD drives or Samsung cannot fail. Of course they can, they are mechanical objects. I AM saying though that with these brands, you'll have the best chance of actually getting your money's worth with drives which will serve you great until YOU decide to replace them with a newer model.