You didn't read my post. I acknowledged that companies like Maxtor and IBM made horrible drives on a more consistent basis than the competition. But with recent changes in the marketplace (mergers and transfers), the line isn't as clear as it used to be. We can no longer point to a single manufacturer and say its drives are of shoddier quality than the others. All the manufacturers are essentially on the same level now, at least on terms of quality (service is an entirely different animal)
Alright, I still heavily disagree with you. What you are saying doesn't make any sense whatsoever. What you're saying would be the same thing as saying that all car manufacturers are just as reliable, when in fact a Kia isn't going to be near as reliable as a Toyota or Honda or Mitsubishi or what have you. Not all cars are manufactured equally, and not all hard drives are manufactured equally.
Just because Seagate bought Maxtor doesn't mean that the drives are identical. It takes time for companies to merge R&D, and Seagate/Maxtor have not reached that point yet. And moving forward, I don't think that Seagate will be making DiamondMax hard drives anymore, but will eventually just phase Maxtor out and sell Seagate only drives, in which reliability wouldn't have changed any. Seagate really only purchased Maxtor to gain their markets, not their technology. And to be honest, Maxtor sucks, so what would Seagate really gain from their technologies? To add to that, Maxtor has still sucked since the merger, because their DiamondMax line still has strange incompatibility issues with certain chipsets until you update the firmware. Maxtor hasn't changed since the merger, and neither has Seagate. The only thing they gained was increased marketshare and a broader market.
With cars, go ask an auto mechanic which brand is more reliable and he will have a hard set opinion most likely. The same goes with hard drives. Go talk to any computer repair shop or data recovery center and they will give you their opinion. Do google searches, etc, call some of these data recovery centers, and I believe you will find most of them think that Seagate drives are the most reliable. That's how it has been in my experience and many of my friends at school (computer engineers), co-workers (IT), and people I deal with at a local data recovery center will all tell you that Seagate is by far the better brand.
If you can do a google search and provide me with good proof that all hard drives are the same and that one brand is no more reliable than another, then you're right and I give up. But the fact of the matter is that different hard drive manufacturers use different designs and different components, and certain manufacturers will have a better track record (Seagate) than others (WD, Maxtor, IBM, etc). Saying that modern hard drives are similar would be an arguable statement (How is a perpendicular recording drive the same as a normal drive???), but saying that they are all the same and one brand is not more reliable than others just doesn't make any logic to me whatsoever.
But I do need to buy a second HD for cloning backups to.. so.. that will be a Seagate. Then maybe I can compare the two..somehow.
