atleast the samsung drives give you a warning theyre going to die, the maxtors just flat out die without any warning.

There's been a lot of buy outs in the hard drive market in the last few years...

First Maxtor bought Quantum, then Hitachi bought IBM's drive division. Next it was Seagate buying Maxtor. Now WD is buying up some of the parts suppliers. There's probably a few more in there...

On the desktop side there are only three major players (IMO) and they are WD, Seagate and Hitachi. I still consider Samsung an "up and coming" in the HDD market.

It's pretty much the same three major players on the laptop side as well, with Toshiba thrown in for good measure.

The server side is a completely different story. Fujitsu and Seagate have that pretty well covered. Hitachi is a player, but not as much as even Fujitsu. I wish WD would get back into SCSI (and now SAS) drives. I guess it could be argued that their SATA 3Gb/s drives could be used on SAS controllers, but I'd much prefer to have actual SAS drives.

I used WD for years until those damnable 250GB SATA drivers that scream like a banshee! They finally moved to the newer, quieter motors though and now have some of the faster drives on the market again so I may move back to them in the near future. For now my machine has 2x250GB 7200.10 SATA's and 2x400GB 7200.10 SATA's and my server has 2x80GB 7200.8 PATA's (RAID1) and 4x400GB 7200.10 SATA's (RAID5). My other machines have a mixture of Seagate and WD drives.