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since 1996 or so, the only drive I've had going wrong (apart from a seperate IDE controller which went in 96 ish) was a maxtor 40GB, and that was pretty much my own fault because I ran it in a 'quiet' enclosure without the metal heat sink brackets, it overheated and started developing errors. mostly running 500GB sata western digital blues now (apart from my hitachi 2TB external). the annoying thing with two IDE western dig's I have is they can't be used on docking stations because of the jumper configuration.