They are fine, usually after you've reformatted them, and have an OS that can find the sectors as they go bad. Unless you are one of the 40% that don't have that problem. I've had a few Quantium Bigfoot drives, I don't have them anymore. My friends used to have them, so did my brother. At the time it was a good buy, but used up that 5 1/4 drive bay. Then, as said, within the first year errors were found. After a reformat, and a few sessions with Scandisk or Diskdoctor or some other disk utility the drives got fixed, for a while anyway. ;)