I normally wouldn't spam you guys, but this deal is simply too good to pass up.

not bad. but I'm not an external HD kinda guy, nor do i like off brand hard drives. I don't even buy from western digital anymore since I lost a 120gigger from them for no reason.

Fixed

Stupid. Harddrives dies, that's the nature of thing.

Actually there's a well documented issue with 120GB/160GB WD drives that fail at a far higher rate than normal. I too was a victim of it, but luckily mine died just a couple weeks before the warranty was up.

Really? Interesting, I've never seen it. Also, I had one die on me too...

Ive had numerous Maxtor/Seagate and Samsung drives that have YET to die (the samsung drive is 6 years old now) but the WD didnt even last 2 years. Sorry, but why would I buy from them again? On a 'it happens...*shrug*' basis?

If it makes you feel any better, I've replaced numerous Maxtor hard drives at work. That's what the bulk of our systems ship with. I've also replaced several Seagate drives that were in RAID arrays. As someone else said, hard drives die. All you can do is back your stuff up and buy Seagate because their warranty is five years, so you have a better chance of not having to pay for a new drive.

I personally stay away from Maxtor just because of my experiences at work, but it probably isn't all that rational. The only reason so many fail is that's what most of our systems happen to use.

Wow, I actually agree with aoejedi. WDs and Maxtors fail pretty frequently, and I wouldn't touch anything that I've not heard of before. The only way to go is Seagate.

And FYI, Seagate owns Maxtor. The drives that are good enough are sold as Seagate and the ones that weren't are sold as Maxtor. That's also the reason Seagate drives have a 5 year where as the Maxtor drives only have a 3 year.

Yes, actually. It DOES happen. I've had a maxtor 40 gig for about 5 years, and it still runs strong. I know people who have had the same drive that crapped out in 3 months.

It happens--the manufacturing process for harddrives, motherboards, processors, basically every component in your computer is so damn hard to perfect that there's always gonna be a margin of error. Ask anyone who's had DOA motherboards, processors, RAM, harddrives, PSU's. Nothing's perfect, but that's why they make warranties.

I happened to be checking out the neighborhood Staples last weekend and found a WD 500 gigger for $100. I'm glad to see that that seems to be a good price. Horrifying that I have, in the past and when necessary, spent more money on SD cards or thumb drives that hold 1/250th of the data.

Interesting the comments about drive failures. I'm considering carbonite.com. Not that I didn't know drives failed but as we all end up with more and more digital data that we would prefer not to lose forever, I'm thinking about an online backup service.

Indeed.

Online backup services are way too ****ing expensive. Just get some archival DVDs, dual layer if you can, and burn your **** off. If you need recovery, GetDataBack NTFS/FAT is the way to go.

I don't consider $50 per year way too ****ing expensive, especially when there is no size limit. Certainly not disagreeing with you that there are alternatives, though.