We have 3 computers at home, the hard disc my dad currently uses came from my old pc, its a Seagate 28.5gb 7200rpm drive, started use in November 1999. Up to now it is still working perfectly, no bad sectors.

Then around 2 years ago I purchased another seagate drive, this time 80gb 7200rpm, the drive failed after 3 mos., complete failure. It was eventually replaced with a new drive, same specs that developed bad sectors after over a year, however right now it does not show any bad sectors anymore.

I also have a Maxtor 40gb 5400rpm drive, 3 years old, it has problems every now and then, sometimes it would just crash and wont be detected by the BIOS, then sometimes it would work again.

I guess its really hard to say which brand is better. Next time I'm buying a disc it would probably be a Western Digital though.