I've always bought Seagate. Wouldn't even think of buying any of the cheaper stuff (Maxtor, WD). So, after one of my drive's in Obiwan went bad, I had to finally get off my butt and get an external HD for backups for one more level of sanity.

I bought one of the new Seagate Freeagent drives, a 500GB USB2 drive that could hold all of Obiwan.

I dismissed the reviews I read on Newegg that said that "This drive sucks on Linux". I like to think of myself as more capable around the system as the average "I heard Ubuntu was cool, bgut how do I display the contents of a directory again?" shmoe that posts on newegg, so I bought it anyways.

The reviews were right. I was able to mount the drive after some futzing and plugging and unplugging the power and USB cable in different combinations (there's no power switch). After mounting, I went to format using ext3. Halfway through, it quit and that was that. Wasn't ever able to get it to come back. All I knew was that the big yellow light flashed on and off "device error" is what the manual said.

I connected to windows, and windows wouldn't recognize it either (device error in device manager). Same thing on OSX.

I sent it back, and swallowed my pride and bought a WD lifebook. Mounted first thing, formatted, and rsync'd obiwan to it with no problems.

So much for brand-loyalty. The brand-name of the drive that originally failed in Obiwan? Seagate. Ever since they bought Maxtor, it hasn't been the same. What a disappointment.