🚀 go-pugleaf

About three months ago I bought a Seagate ST3283A hard drive
(that's the 240 MB, 12ms model).  When I installed it, it made an
extremely high-pitched, ear-piercing whine that could be heard in the 
next room.  I called tech support, they said "Bad bearings, send it back."
I did, and got a new drive. The new one was much quieter, but still 
made a very audible whirring sound (at least as loud as the power
supply fan).  Since it was quieter, I thought "Well, maybe this model
just makes more noise than my previous drive because it is bigger and 
faster."  Then, wierd things started happening in Windows, like
"Extremely Low on Memory" errors with no apps running and 8MB of real 
RAM.  I began to suspect the drive was hiccupping and doing bad
things to Windows' attempts to access the swapfile.  The problems 
subsided when I turned off Windows' 32-bit access option.  Last night, 
Windows locked up solid with no warnings or errors.  It took a hardware 
reset to unlock it.  Then my machine wouldn't boot from hard disk or 
floppy until I powered it down and up again.  The power-on self
test kept reporting "HDD Failure."  Looks to me like another bad drive.

So, my question is this:  Has anyone else on this group gotten the 
ST3283A?  What were your expereneces? Is this drive loud by nature, or
have I gotten two bad apples in a row?  I am interested in any experiences, 
good and bad, so I know whether to keep exchanging this for the same
model or cut my losses and get a different drives.

Thanks in advance, 
Bruce A Backman  (bruce@frontiertech.com)