Blakerwry,
If the reason for limiting the manufacturer's of your HD buying is the warrentee issues regarding refurbished drives, I strongly suggest that you call the manufacturers tech support lines and find out their policies regarding replacement/refurbished drives. I didn't know about the policy untill after I had to return a return. This type of policy may differ from manufacturer to manufacturer and thus worth the phone call to each one. You do yourself a disservice by boycotting some drive manufacturers based on the policy if others/all that you do not boycott do the same thing.
Also note that warrentee policies like what we are describing can change on a manufacturers whim. So that even if I had a problem several years ago with Maxtor, it does not necessarily follow that they have the same policy now. With that in mind, include Maxtor in the same set of phone calls as above, just to make sure that they have not changed the policy between when I delt with the issue and now.