Seagate used liquid bearings long before Maxtor.
as far as I can hear, my 2 Seagate's put together make practically no noise
Maxtor are a lot better than they used to be - when they were Quantum and made really bad "fireball" hard drives - but I still think Seagate and Western Digital make better quality drives.
Maxtor try to make fast drives, but that's partly what makes them bad. they don't last as long.
I don't want to turn this into a flame war, but X850's still lack the OpenGL performance Nvidia gets.