My experiences with Seagate have been somewhat poor. I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt and think of my experiences as abnormal, not representative of what a "normal" user would experience. My first experience with a drive purchased from them was back in 2004. After much searching, I found a 160GB Seagate UATA HD for a good price. I bought the last one Circuit City had in stock and happily took it home. It installed fine and formatted without problems (thought slowly). After a few days I put the drive through its paces, copying multi-gigabyte files to it. I started to get CRC errors. I ran a diagnostic and found that the drive was defective. Back to Circuit City it went.
It's now 2006 and I decided to give Seagate another shot. Bought a 300GB UATA HD from Fry's and installed it. This time I ran the diagnostics PRIOR to formatting or installing any software. It took a few hours but it tested fine. Formatting took all night (it's a 300GB HD after all). That's when the problems started happening.
1. Original XP Pro CD cannot handle hard drives of 127GB or higher. I need at least SP1 for that. I can't find my slipstreammed SP2 so I decide to use my Legit Sp1a CD. That seems to work until the first reboot. Then it errors out with "Error loading Operating System". By this point I'm getting apprehensive about the drive. But since I'd never actually installed XP using that CD before, I chalked it up as a fluke and decided to just create another slipstreammed SP2 CD.
2. Create another SP2 cd. Follow the directions online, burn cd, reboot. Error... Hmmm...
3. Create ANOTHER sp2 cd. Follow the directions online (find the step I skipped over last time), burn cd, reboot. Instal starts.
4. Choose partition, setup copies files, reboot... "Error loading operating system..." Crap.
5. Off to google. Find something about changing the addressing mode from "Auto" to "LBA". Try that and install goes through! (I also found an article that says to NOT use LBA and to use "Large" instead.
Install went off rather uneventfully after that problem. I'm not copying all 80+ gigs of data off my 100GB HD onto the 300GB HD. The 100GB HD will be handed down to my sister to replace her 40GB IBM Deathstar that died recently.