Recommended Hard drive maker

Okay,
I've just lost yet another fricking 500Gb Sata HDD, this one gave no indication as to impending doom either :( - I guess I'm not buy seagate again or at least not from the shop I've bought that one out of. I say another that's the 2nd in less than a year I'm sure of it. NOT a happy bunny.

I did have it running BOINC on all 4 cores, along with some other software. No real back up - I know I still have the last drive that well makes a racket but at least works if some what slowly or I HOPE it still does.
Was just about to start talking to my girlfriend, yahoo messenger locked up.. No biggie easy to recover from, nope no can do, BOINC - I couldn't even "suspend" that to make get some processor time thinking it was that HDD light was pretty much on, could hear it as well. I gave it a moment or 2 to try and sort itself out - nope..
Power down
Power up.........
The dreaded "please sort your drive out there isn't an O/S on this one" type message - reboot, into bios :hair:
Once it got there - 2 drives show up, my 320 and my 360, no 500gb.

I did manage to get it to see it but even Spinrite 6 running level 2 just seemed to sit there I'm thinking it's the controller board :( - I hope it's just the board and the physical drive is ok.


So any hints / tips on getting it back and what drive or drives to replace it with and a reputable source of them in the UK.

Okay tried it on level 4 on spinrite, was going really, really, freaking slow, paused it (stupidly) ran some drive tests random seek was throwing errors galore and now SMART has marked the drive BAD :(
I got seatools wonder if I can do anything with it or is it a brick totally.

You should be able to get it replaced by Seagate, HD's usually have a 2-3 year warranty on them.

Yes I believe this is under a year looked on seagate warranted until March 2013..

I like Samsung HDDs, none failed yet in 30+ boxen running 24/7. The 7200rpm 1TB drives are only a couple of bucks more than the 500MB so I buy the larger ones now.

Had similar problems to your report with 2 Seagate HDDs but I didn't waste my time RMA'ing them. HDDs are so cheap these days they're a consumable item.

Also had two OCZ SSDs die with the first month but I RMA'd them as they were >$500 items. I buy Corsair SSDs now.

Thanks Vaugan, Bok - I'll have a look, liking Western Digital as I only replace that drive as the bad sector count went up I think the board got bad power to it when the PSU was failing but I'm going to try and Zero it out and start again. I got a Samsung they are good your right and a Hitachi in there also. So I'll go for one of those there now just to find someplace that sells 'em at a nice price and not just Seagate or cheap-yet not cheap Seagate aka Maxtor. I might step up a size but I'm wary of Heat in those thing makes 'em more vunerable maybe time for a new case as well :( argh need to save up to move to the US man...

Beware - I got a new drive - 500Gb WD Green drive - £39.99 from PC World, I know but well they had a Seagate for £28.99 I wasn't gonna get bitten twice and I will get a reindexed drive back for the one that failed.