Maxtors have come a long way and are suprisingly quiet these days : I too used to avoid them like the plague until recently when I had a failure on my co located server.
I was running the IBM deathstars LOL and they are so bad that even lemmings cant keep up with their downtime. Was very lucky to have had them running in the machine for 5 years but one of them died just recently rushed to the data centre and to my suprise the buddy I rent the space from actually had a pack of like 20 odd maxtors - interesting -and this guy is like 100x more techie than me.
Anyway I popped a maxtor in there so far so good ...
Just logged on and am seeing errors on the second old IBM deathstar grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.....
root enigma:~> uptime
11:56pm up 41 days, 6:15, 1 user, load average: 2.03, 2.05, 2.04
root enigma:~> grep error /var/log/messages
Oct 15 10:00:10 enigma kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
Oct 15 10:00:10 enigma kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
Oct 15 10:46:34 enigma kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
Oct 15 14:00:07 enigma kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
Oct 15 14:00:07 enigma kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
Oct 15 15:00:10 enigma kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
Oct 15 16:00:06 enigma kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
Oct 15 17:00:09 enigma kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
feck I cant be assed to go and fix it : I just let it break and then go
ps I still prefer seagates