I bought a 20.5GB Western Digital drive and it made noise from the time I put it in until the time I took it out and carried it back to Best Buy! When I was getting a refund, I looked and saw where someone else had returned another Western Digital drive earlier that same day. I ended up buying another Quantum drive to go with the one I already had installed in my computer.

But Maxtor are good drives too. I'll never buy another Western Digital drive.

My big drives are all IBM. They run well, but I don't have anything to compare them too.
hda: Maxtor 53073U6, 29311MB w/2048kB Cache, CHS=3736/255/63
hdb: IBM-DPTA-373420, 32634MB w/1961kB Cache, CHS=4160/255/63
hdd: IBM-DJNA-372200, 21557MB w/1966kB Cache, CHS=43800/16/63
hdc: ATAPI 40X DVD-ROM drive, 512kB Cache

The primary drive on this box came with the machine. On my other machine, it's an IBM from the same series as those two, except it's only 8GB.

My dad has had good luck with Fujitsu drives on servers at work, so that's what he suggested for me when I was upgrading my hard drives at the end of last year...

IBM 75GXP, blazin' fast, reliable, cheap :)
15go per platter, 7200rpm, 2mo cache, ultra dma 100, the 30gigs one is particularly interesting and cheap :)

My family has a strict history of buying only Maxtor drives (for IDE). This is because back in 1991 or so my father had 4 WDs fail on him in the space of a few weeks. We've never had ANY problems with Maxtor.

We have one WD in the house, in the proxy. The Maxtor, in the same computer, supossedly the same RPM, both ATA33, is 33% faster.

At least you have WD, they send you a new one before you ship your old one back. You can even use the same box. It's a really good deal. If you don't send one back they just bill your credit card the price of that one...

My apartment complex in all it's infinite wisdom decided to flick my power a couple times, which pretty much ruined (at least I think that's why) my 17 gig seagate, which I now have to send back. They don't have to the cool deal that WD does. Count yourself lucky.

IBM fuckin rules if you're looking for something that's still relatively affordable, and IDE. My computer has an IBM drive and I've never had a problem with it.. they just make really quality drives.

I'd have to go with the IBM drives as well... I've got two in my system right now, no trouble so far.

My old (97) Western digital was always noisy(scratchy sounding)

I've bought three maxtors (not at all noisy).
I had two 8.4gig hooked up and sometimes my secondary drive would "disappear" and windows system device manager would say my IDE controller was missing or broken.
The hard drive that always disappeared was the good one, the other (primary) maxtor died (after 1.5 years).

I'm 2 for 3 with maxtors, i'll keep buying them unless another breaks (because they're quiet)

Well, traditionally I've had the best luck with IBM drives. I've actually never had one fail on me yet.

I didn't used to care for Maxtor drives, because the first hard drive I ever had die was a Maxtor. However, everything I've read and heard says that they've gotten a *lot* better in the last few years. In fact, as I understand it, IBM drives are made from mostly Maxtor parts now.

Western Digital I won't buy again. I used to have a high opinion of them, but I've had three western digital drives die on me in a period of about 8 months, and one of them was only two months old.

Quantum and Seagate are both decent drives as well. I wouldn't really push for or against either of them, mostly due to lack of personal experience with them.

I'll finish with the statement that I'm buying another hard drive in a few weeks, and it will be an IBM drive. ;-)

IBM makes some of the parts that the other drive makers have to use. They have the copyright .