[citation][nom]soo-nah-mee[/nom]It's the "2 decades" part that probably instills that opinion in you. Seagate USED to be the top dog. Their quality has gone downhill in my experience. WD Scorpio Black for laptops IMO; without a second thought.[/citation]
I can second this. I have a laptop that is 2 years old and went through 2 Seagate Hard Drives, one regular and one performance (7200rpm), and they both died within 6 months. I bought a WD last year and have had no problems as of yet. I also have a WD from my desktop that has lasted 6 years. That desktop also has a Hitachi external drive which is going strong on 3 years, and a Seagate which has been replaced by other Seagate drives 3 times in the last 5 years. However, I still have two Seagate drives from my original Mac Pro G4, 9 years old, and while they have not been under heavy use like the others, the drive is still running strong. Clearly in the past Seagate made good drives, but obviously Seagate needs better quality control today. One consumer should not have to go through 5 drives in 5 years while other brand drives last considerably longer. However this article is on trade secrets, and if WD is guilty, then they deserve to pay the fines. Being a fan one way or another should not influence a court decision like this.
P.S. I have also owned 2 Maxtors, one died the other is still kicking after 7 years, I tend to keep my hard drives until they break. My primary desktop has 4 internal 1 external (varying sizes from 40GB for a system backup to 1TB for my music and videos) and my laptop has 1 internal and 2 externals since they are all around 250GB, which is not enough for me on the go. I have a small collection going, and Seagate recently has dropped the ball on quality control. I do plenty of video editing so my drives do get a lot of heavy use and it tends to test the quality of them. Own no SSD's as of yet but looking this Black Friday for a good deal on an Intel 5 Series