Well, I had a string of Maxtor failures, one after another. The first was totally not the drives fault, it was 2 months old, and a car hit a telephone pole down the road, making the lights go out and back on about 4 times in the period of a few seconds, while I was writing to the drive and it started going sour almsot instantly. I went and bought a replacement Maxtor, and a decently sized APC UPS. I thought I would be ok, then a few months later, I got a BSOD, and when I rebooted it, I got the dreaded "drive not found" and the big "CLICK". I had sent the original HD back to Maxtor for replacement, and put it in, and it failed about 7 months later, but it was very slow in dying, it just clicked once in a while, and I was able to copy everything over to the new Maxtor drive, a replacement for the second drive. This one lasted two weeks. The replacement lasted 2 hours, then another replacement was DOA.
In the meantime, I had bought a 10 gig WD, that one still is in my old PC that a friend has now, and works fine.
MY old PC finally died, so I bought a Dell with a Maxtor, and 11 months later, it failed suddenly and without warning. The replacement 20 gig was a WD, and that drive today is in an external case and I use it to copy files over to friend's PCs. That PC survived a lightning hit that blew up my UPS, and took out the modem too. I was shocked when it booted up ok after I heard the UPS blow up!
I've never lost a Seagate or WD drive. My first Seagate, a 65 MEG RLL drive is STILL running over 16 years after I bought it. It came in my Packard Bell 286 that is alive and well running a friend's ham radio packet beacon 24/7. Everything in the case is original, except the sound card I added back in 1990. SOme PB stuff was great, as time went by though, it got more and more propritary and worthless.
If you were older, so you could drive, you could try this. Volunteer to take your little brother or sis to the store/school/whatever, or to go to the grocery store for mom. Mention you need gas money. If they give you a credit card, your'e out of luck, but if it's cash, just save a couple of bucks out of say 10 or so, and you will have the cash in no time. I financed several radio/stereo items this way over the years..
