Any reason I shouldn't buy this drive?

[Dyne]

So there ARE problematic Seagate drives.

What the hell caused this?

They joined with Hitachi iirc (makers of the Deathstar line).

[stormy]

Looks like I was pretty fortunate with the drive I have; it's one of the affected model numbers but my serial number is fine.

make sure your firmware is up to date.

[cigsthecat]

make sure your firmware is up to date.

I've used the software tools on the site and they say I don't need an update. However my firmware is listed as part of the problem. I created a support ticket to double check.

[Dyne]

Do it anyway.

[GohanX]

I'm just wondering about stability of terabyte drives really and what the differences are between models that basically have the same specs with large price differences (even among Seagate drives).

I'll put up some links later.

I'm not sure if companies are still doing this, but I recall that when terabyte external drives first started coming out in my store many companies cheated and had two 500 gig drives in one big enclosure. The ones that were really 1 TB were a hundred bucks more expensive.