All I have to say about Wal-Mart is summarized right here in this little video:

http://www.jibjab.com/originals/big_box_mart

It doesn't help matters any that these banks and investment companies based all of their loan packages, etc on the silly assumption that home prices would continue to rise exponentially. When they stopped rising, the house of cards collapsed.

THE UNUSUAL SUSPECT: I purchased a Maxtor external drive and it has performed rather well. Yes, I know Maxtor drives aren't the highest quality, but this drive hasn't died within the first month like the rest I've purchased. I think they might actually be using higher quality drives in their externals than they offer for their internal stuff. Probably due to the fact that they can charge more for the external as internal drives are viewed as commodity parts nowadays.

Another reason these drives suck:

2 MB Cache, sometimes when 8 or even 16 are advertised on the box. It's a crapshoot on what you actually get.

IDE native interface connected to A)USB 2.0 (defaults to 1.1) or B)Firewire C)Cat5 (I have seen all three versions at my local WalMart)

7200 RPM instead of 10,000 RPM like it should be (again a crapshoot, some actually ARE 10,000 RPM, and some have even measured out at 5400 RPM)

Buggy drive controller circuits (This is a problem with WD drives above 320 GB - it's almost like they hacked on the ability to deal with anything over 320 instead of designing a new controller)

The network controller interface on the enclosure is set to work at only the minimum connection rate on most home wireless routers that have NAS capability - 1/2 instead of 10/100/1000 via ethernet.

There's some other issues people mentioned as well, such as faulty software. Cooling is a big issue with these NAS devices from WD. They run hot.

My best guess is, on the manufacturing line, they are using surplus notebook drives as well as the normal hard drives they should be and claim that they are using. No offense to manufacturing stuff in mainland China, but this happens more often now that production takes place there instead of in Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan where WD used to have their drives made.

Another note: They do 1 TB by putting in dual 2.5" 500 GB drives and the controller in the enclosure reports them as a single drive to your system. Don't let them fool you. I've taken a few of these apart so I could scavenge the drives and toss the junk enclosure.

@Yamara: Wow, you had to write a letter to her as well? Central Dauphin School District was still making students write letters to various approved authors even into the 90's....and we had to write her a letter for English/Creative Writing class in 9th grade. Our class had to write Stephen King and Kurt Vonnegut at various stages of our publik edumakashun in that oh-so-wonderful school district.

Disclaimer: Central Dauphin East class of 95'.