Apparently the posters in this thread are not aware that Maxtor is owned by Seagate.
EDIT: doh, I just noticed how old this thread is. Damn google. I'm not sure if Seagate owned Maxtor in 2002.
I work in IT so I see a good amount of bad drives. My impression is that major vendor drives tend to fail within product lines more than within vendors. That is, one particular revision of Seagate laptop drives are failing in previous generation of Apple MacBook Pros. This doesn't mean that seagate laptop drives are faulty.. but they did have one bad product run.
This wasn't always the case. About 8-10 years ago, samsung and hitachi 3.5" IDE drives were terrible,.. samsung in particular. We purchased 2 cases of them [lab machines] and they ALL went back on RMA 2-3 times over their lives. Run after run, they would fail. Other samsungs were coming in bad at the same time. I'm still gun-shy but It's my understanding that they got their production problems under control like all the manufacturers.
I've got 300GB Maxtors in my servers. They're fluid-dynamic bearings, quite, fast, and they've been purring without a failure [24x7] for over 3 years now.
It's important to remember that failure Trends ARE important but failures are not. Just because Jack or Joe Schmoe's drive failed doesn't mean Manufacturer X makes bum drives. Look at the drive specs, see if they match what you want, then buy and cross your fingers.
On a personal note.. I do personally prefer Seagate. They were, for a time, the quietest. This isn't always the case anymore. I've heard plenty of Seagates that are louder than other vendors these days. Seagate does make a drive that is designed to be extra quiet (or at least they did a year ago).
Almost forgot.. just a tip. Most vendors have Windows utilities that can be used to tune your drive performance. You can make a lot of hard drives quieter by tuning them. Performance degrades but the drive quiets down.
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm (hitachi bought IBM's storage division)