What rivals? WDC isn't anyone's rival. The only rival was Maxtor and they just bought Maxtor.
Winchester is long dead.
I've stopped buying Maxtor drives. Their big drives (>160 GB) seem to die after a couple of years. They use to have a 5 year warranty. Now its only a year. Seagate is one of the few that still offers a 5 year warranty.
Even without Maxtor, Seagate, based in the Cayman Islands but with operational headquarters in Scotts Valley, Calif., is No. 1. It's followed by Japan's Hitachi, (HIT) which bought IBM's (IBM) disk drive business two years ago, and Lake Forest, Calif.-based Western Digital, (WDC) which Thursday traded at its highest stock price since 1997.