Seagate has had some problems

[ucodegen]

Seagate has had some problems in the firmware for their 500GB, 750GB, 1TB and 1.5TB drives in the past (won’t spin up, goes to sleep and ‘can’t get up’.. ). Supposedly, they fixed the bugs. Seagate used to have very good quality hard drives. After they were ‘taken private’, their quality suffered.

Ref to problems with the 7200.11 version of the drive.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9126280/Complaints_flood_Seagate_over_hard_drive_problems
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/17/0115207
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/01/16/barracuda_failure_plague/
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Desktop-ATA-and-Serial-ATA/Official-st31000340as-1TB-barracuda-epic-fail-thread/m-p/14525?view=by_date_ascending

Comp-USA is not the only one with this price.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4691122&CatId=2459

What is interesting is that the CompUSA page and Tigerdirect page mimic each other, down to the comments.