About hard drives in general and specifically Western Digital and Seagate.
Seagate and Western Digital continued to have all the old problems. Or I should have  this should be a news item, but  the issue cannot be attached to a certain date. It's been going on for the past few years. Taking a look around Western Digital is getting some bad reviews. Of course, this is my subjective observation. Here is my reasoning on this. There many individual posts all over the Internet about people COMPLAINING about Western Digital 1 TB drive.
But the focus on ONE external drives in particular. One model sold on Amazon and there are over 200 customer reviews. One would imagine that certainly they sold more than 200 of these drives, but only about 200 of the customers decided to give any feedback to Amazon. A large number of reviews were very positive, giving the Western Digital portable drive pretty good AVERAGE rating. However, there are about 26 negative reviews. That really is bad news. That means about 10% of the users were very unhappy with the product. This is fairly strong empirical evidence that there is a problem with this product.
Yes, I mention Seagate at the start of this post. Seagate also has had some problems, however Seagate is a very large company and make so many different kinds of drives it's hard to find information specific to a product line. APPARENTLY, the technology used to create these extreme high density drives presents a problem to all of the manufacturers. They say the problems have been resolved, and maybe they have. Yet end-users are still are reporting problems in the first quarter of this year.
So, what's my point here? If you really need a high-capacity external hard drive, at 50 or $60 from your local Wal-Mart, Staples or maybe even your drugstore on the corner, the price is certainly very attractive. At the instant you get any trouble, time to make use of the warranty and send it right back to them.
Reference:
HTTP://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Expander-eSATA-External/dp/B001UHOR88
Or do your our search for reports for the current year.
What do you think?

P.S. Seagate sales were very bad the end of last year.
Quote

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Seagate Technology reported a 72% in quarterly profit, as sales fell sharply at the hard-disk drive maker.

Where do you find this carp ? ?
It's just one story after another...

Ahead of the Bell: Seagate climbs
More from BusinessWeek
NEW YORK
Shares of Seagate Technology got a boost in premarket trading Friday after the hard disk drive maker said it will resume dividends for investors after canceling the quarterly payout in 2009.
... http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9MFGDC00.htm

2 years old...and they offered Free replacements to rvery customer...

Stop beatin a dead horse.