I may be remembering the Google study and/or something else from about that time frame. I have a vague recollection now of both Google's opinion and and something else that had at least some degree of separation from Google.

Thanks very much for the informative response. I'll have a look at these (as soon as I talk myself down sufficiently from my guilt over my price-motivated Seagate purchase ;-).

In part, I also pushed the button on Seagate (despite the 1 TB "click of death" episode from a few years ago) because a recent WD laptop HD purchase went rather bad with incessant parking that is apparently inherent to the model's firmware. I finally fixed that on the XP Pro machine it lives in by finding and setting to run on start-up:

http://sites.google.com/site/quiethdd/ [1]

But not before SMART reported significant aging for the drive. Which rather pissed me off. (I should pull it and RMA it -- 5 year warranty.)

So, that helped lead me to Hitachi. Then the price inflation, plus the news that WD is buying Hitachi, and I figured I'd give Seagate another go.

I hate purchasing consumer electronics, these days.

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1. Which I found at about the same time I learned I could tweak the relevant settings manually -- so, I went with the pre-packaged implementation.