I Also had to many problems with my old maxtor 160gb hard drive and I could not return it so I took it out of my computer and smash it on the floor into bunch of pieces, so then i bought a WD 250Gb SATA-150 Never had any problems with it.
i have a few Lite-on cd burners for like 3-4 years and never had a problem with them and i was going to buy a NEC burner but this lite on had better reviews than that other one did.