I love people like you, that not only avoid Seagate but specifically avoid its 1.5TB drives because of a firmware issues that were solved over a year ago.
Your irrational fear of the drives (and people like you) keep them at the lowest per gigabyte price point for 7200 RPM drives on the market (consistently). Heck last year I was scooping them up at prices that match what I get today as retailers were trying to ditch the drives people irrationally won't buy.
I now have 10 of these drives, and I wouldn't trade any of them as they are rock solid despite the reputation. I might have to get a few more while the irrational fear keeps them at an irrationally low price!
Thank you...I like being loved
Part of my perspective is having been burned repeatedly over the years on a lot of different "new" technology...I freely admit it is an illogical opinion on these drives...but I also require reliability. Should it be so tough to ask that Seagate done more testing before shipping this drive initially? I know that it is a pipe dream these days with many different manufacturers...but I am also not usually an early adoptor of new technology for just this reason. Also, I currently own Seagate hard drives, WD hard drives, and some Hitachi drives...along with a few Intel SSDs...so I am not a fanboi of anything.
As for reliability...I have been pretty happy with the Western Digital 1 TB Black drives...I personally own 8 of them between my SBS 2008 server, main workstation and HTPC. Not a problem yet, with the oldest one being over 2 years old. Am I just lucky here? Or were the user reviews right?