I've come across one or two dead Quantums, but that's gotta be out of about 100 or more. In my experience they're extraordinarily reliable.

I also agree that Maxtors are relatively unreliable. Apparently - and I'd never heard this before about any other drive - they have a tendency to get their firmware corrupted, resulting in a drive that seems to spin up but is unreadable. I've experienced this with a 40GB IDE model. What a waste.