I dropped a WD down 5 steps stair.. and it still works!!! It didn't just fall flat on carpeted steps, it went down like a slinky on tiled steps. I couldn't believe it, i ran all sorts of HDD tests i could find, but nothing came up as wrong, not even a lost cluster. I decided to test it by ghosting my OS right onto it, but it's been literally 2 weeks now, and it hasn't crashed or even hiccup. Maybe i dreamt i dropped the drive.
I've had MANY HDDs over the years, and coincidentally, only my Maxtor's died. Even my IBM Deskstars... the old 60GXB or whatever they were called, you know, the notorious one with the click of death... well, both of those drives still work even after... what is it now, 8 years? One of them has been doing the click of death for at least 5 years now, but it still hasn't died!
We had 6 120GB Maxtor's at work in a RAID5 configuration... 2 out of the 6 died, so we took them out and replaced it with WD.
The only drives i haven't tried are Seagates (well Samsung too, but drives are so cheap these days, i see no reason risking it on that), but if i ever need more HDD space, i'm definitely going to try them next. I'll be hooking up another 5 HDD RAID5 array sometime today hopefully (Hitachi's 7K250).
The only good thing with Maxtor drives is the RMA is very easy... at least compared to IBM. IBM wants you to box it up VERY specifically... i never bothered after hearing what they required... the drives still work, even though the click is annoying as hell.