ya rly
Me and my ex each bought the same model of Maxtor external HD (the 200GB One Touch II). Hers failed within two months, and she lost all her data.
I'm still waiting for the inevitable failure of my own, after everything I've heard from other buyers of Maxtor drives.
Sure, you might get lucky and never have a problem, but is it really worth the risk, or even the fear something might go wrong?
You won't lose any sleep over a Seagate, and WD isn't bad either... but don't buy a Maxtor if you care about quality.
To whom it may concern: as far as cost/storage goes right now with HDDs, the sweet spot is right around the 500GB range. A 1TB disk is going to cost you more than twice what a 500GB disk will cost. If you REALLY want to go with a low-cost high-value drive though, even a 250GB is still large enough for most things, and they're practically dirt cheap these days. I'm using a RAID array of 4x250GB HDDs right now, for 500GB of full-redundancy storage... I went with the WDs (hey, even if one DOES fail, it's RAID, so I can just replace it and keep going without losing anything)
Of course THE most economic form of backup data storage is still DVD-R. If you find a deal, it'll only cost you 5-10 cents per GB... that's cheaper than dirt.