I’ve been a long time fan and user of Seagate hard drives, as they are the only brand that have consistently not failed me, like Maxtor, Western Digital, and others.  The first Seagate drive that I ever had die on me was almost 10 years after its first use.  This trend seems to however not follow to its FreeAgent external USB drive line.  I was a bit iffy on trying them out, as I had read online before buying that they had a seemingly high failure rate on arrival.  Low and behold, I ended up buying one from Office Depot around Thanksgiving, as $100 for 500 gigs seemed well worth it, and it was dead on arrival.  I think it ended up passing maybe 1 out of 5 trial formats.  So I swapped it out, tried another, and it was DOA too, passing its format and scandisk, but then failing out on multiple sectors when I tried to use it (I am super obsessive about data integrity).  So I gave up on those.  My fears since I had heard that Seagate bought out Maxtor, the probably lowest quality hard drives on market, had been confirmed, though probably for different reasons.  I did however recently buy a new SATA Seagate 500 gigger @ ~$100 and it seems to be working fine ^_^.

Random Trivia: Gigabyte is actually technically supposed to be pronounced “jigga-byte” as in jiggawatt from the Back to the Future movie(s).  The suffix has just been mispronounced for so long, no one seems to know that Back to the Future actually had it right :-).  I found this out after watching a video from the early 80s on hard drives, and then confirming from multiple dictionaries and sources.