Techbutton wrote: I worked

[quote=Techbutton]

I worked for Hitachi GST, and I have to say that the problem wasn’t Hitachi, it was IBM. IBM quickly sold the hard drive business and Hitachi was plagued with that problem for a very long time.. Hitachi quickly changed the business model IBM was running on..

Others have problems just like Hitachi did, just the name stuck more with the “DeathStar” name people called it..

[/quote]

I believe that the circa 2005ish “meowing” issue was all Hitachi. 

And just to go off on a slight tangent (not Hitachi related – but in general) I feel that a lot of the HDD DOA user reviews that we see on NewEgg etc are in large part due to the shipping experience.  Earlier this month I received two Seagate 2TB drives for my NAS.  the box in which they were packed looked like they participated in a rugby game or something.  The exterior box was in such bad shape that I almost contacted NewEgg for an RMA as I knew for sure that these 3.5″ drives could not have survived the UPS experience that they went through.  I installed them anyways in my NAS and they work fine but I cannot help but believe that if one or both of these drives die prematurely that blame can be directly attributed to the rough handling that they were subjected to during the shipping process. 

For that reason I give sort of a half rate weighting to any DOA type negative customer reviews as it is clear that our shipping options tend to be rather rough on sensitive electronic and other products.