A little history:  When the hard drive industry, uniformly stepped back their three year warranty’s to one year, one company did the opposite: Seagate; they went to FIVE Years.  And  boy did they gobble up market share!  Thus after a year or two the other hard drive manufacturers started to wake up, and moved it back to 3 years.  Thanks Seagate.  A year or so later Seagate stepped back to 3 years.  Then Seagate started to have all kinds of firmware issues, of which I was affected too, and yes this was annoying.  Luckily I am smart enough to have Raid 1, so I never lost 1 single bit or byte of data. Anyways, this is why I still stick with them:

When you return a WD, Samsung, or a Hitachi (even Seagate) you get a refurbished drive, which is the industry standard – no surprises here.  But here’s the difference, Seagate transfers your original warranty over to the drive.  So if you have a DOA drive, and buy a WD, Samsung or Hitachi drive, you actually got a drive with a 90 day warranty on it.  Oops, it turns out 3 years was actually 3 months.  Lucky you.  But when you buy Seagate, you are basically paying to guaranteed have the drive of your choosing for the full warranty period no matter how many times it fails.

For example, if you have the unfortunate luck of having a hard drive fail every 3 months and 1 day, your original single Seagate purchase will get you though the 3 year period, while you would have to pay Western Digital, Samsung or Hitachi for ABOUT 10 more hard drives.  When all hard drive fail, are you still willing to pay several times more for the same storage?  If so, I applaud your loyalty.

Oh yeah, and another thing, Raid 1 your drives if you haven’t already!