Yeah, seagate isn't the fastest, but they are silent and very reliable. My Western Digital has been good. It's done some weird things before(like just quit showing up in the bios one day) but with some tinkering it came back.
Maxtor, I have some older ones, I still have a 60G, and some othesr that have been ok, but as I said earlier, I had 5 or 6 that died on me. Maybe it's that series? It was a 30G at first that kept messing up, so they upgraded me to a 40, but it still gave me some, but less frequent problems.