I've had serious problems with Maxtor and Linux. Whenever I've used a Maxtor drive with Linux in the past 6 years, my message log fills up with a seemingly endless string of "0x51 DriveNotRead SeekComplete Error" and "0x04 DriveStatusError" The drives never failed, but were... flakey. This happened on every single Maxtor drive I've ever used. I've even tested the rest of the hardware loop by removing the Maxtor drive and replacing it with a Seagate... and with the Seagate on the exact same ide port/cable as the Maxtor I get zero errors. I also ran into the problem on more than one computer config... so it wasn't limited to some quirk of the specific computer I had. Anyway YMMV (to use an internet cliche). One of my co-workers has no problems with Maxtor... although he seems to be in the minority. I tend to stick with Seagate. I've also used Samsung and Fujitsu without problems.