Over the past decade I have probably purchased 10 Seagate drives. Four out of eight EIDE drives needed to be returned because of various problems (including the classic 'click of death'). Recently, less than 6 months ago I bought a pair of 1.5Tb SATA drives off Dell-Online. One I had to pull from my workstation when I kept getting a Failing S.M.A.R.T. Status alert in Disk Utilities. The second, just this past several weeks now, I am having chronic problems w/its ability to read and write data. BOTH 'went south' in less than 9 months!

A good friend of mine who is a technician has always recommended Seagate drives, telling me "all things being equal their performance is at the top of the list and their 5 year 'unconditional' warranty is the best in the industry." Terrific. But let's look a bit closer at Seagate's largesse:

- Forget about the inconvenience of running test after test, consulting again and again w/technicians while getting ideas on how best to diagnose a problem via forums.

- Let's also forget about the p.i.t.a. it's going to be archiving then re-installing one's native OS, all the third party software, the potential surprises one day in the future finding that AS the Seagate drive was in the process of going south it may well have corrupted some of your data... Forget the lost productivity.

- YOU box it ship it AND PAY FOR SHIPPING Seagate's defective product(s) back to them. (And oh, by the way, you must ship PRECISELY as Seagate tells you to. Achtung!)

- And Seagate's generous replacement? You pay whatever price to Seagate or a vendor for a *brand new* hard drive (or so they say) AND YOU GET IN RETURN A REFURBISHED DRIVE! What a deal!!!

- Want a bit of help from a live person? Be prepared to spend endless time on hold and then again online (when your call is finally connected) with an off-shore 'representative' who knows NOTHING more than what is on a menu of set company replies to most commonly asked questions. Got a question or concern that's outside of the cheat-sheet set before them? "Please Meester Mike, hold for me just a moment while I check on that..." And DON'T EVER ask to speak to a supervisor or be put through to a company representative in the States: In both cases you will remain on-hold for 10-20 minutes before, from out of the blue comes a telco recording we've all heard in the past: "If you'd like to make a call please hang up and try again..."

Buy Seagate? (Or Maxtor now that is part of the Seagate 'family'?) NEVER AGAIN!