Western Digital drives can often be found cheaper than some other brands, but I wouldn't buy one. When I used to do PC service for a school, all of their PCs had WD hard drives. In about one year, we had a 3 foot high stack of those drives that had failed. On the other hand, I have never had a Maxtor or a Seagate fail. This was back when 4 GB hard drives were a big deal though, so WD's newer drives could be made better, I don't know since I never bought another one after my bad expierence.