WD had a 6GB IDE drive (Caviar 36000 i believe) that I had to RMA many of.

How long ago were you getting 6GB drives? I think things may have changed again since the time you're speaking of.

I can remeber back in the <1GB days when WD was the best and Maxtor was the worst. Now, it is the exact oposite. If I can help it, I stay as far away from WD as possible.

I would hardly call WD the worst HDD company. I've bought nothing but WD drives for a long time, and keep in mind that Laura's not putting 6 drives in a RAID config. she's looking for a desktop hard drive. IMHO, WD has great drives for that. My 80GB SE drive is incredibly quiet and very fast. WD also has a great RMA system that I used to replace a drive that failed on me only because of some stuff I was doing to it.


I like Maxtor; Their RMA policy doesn't suck (they will ship you a drive if you provide a credit card number they can "hold" against, then you ship the old one back)

Western Digital also has this RMA option. I didn't choose it because I didn't need a new drive all that quickly.