Lacie Drives - Shoddy and Fraudulent?

A while ago I bought a LaCie 250 GB external drive (the silver type, not the Lego ones). I use it to store important data (music, code, system backups, etc), and periodically back it up to a 250GB internal drive in my gaming rig.

Not long ago, I discovered files missing from the drive. Scandisk revealed bad sectors on the drive. When the OS software detects bad sectors, you can kiss the drive goodbye - by then the hardware has been hiding bad sectors until it's internal bad sector map is full. Over time the drive kept losing files and capacity, so I finally bought a replacement external drive (Maxtor 500GB, $250 at Fry's last weekend if you're wondering).

I googled on the LaCie drive and found a ton of anecdotal reports of consistent drive failure. A lot of reports found that removing the drive from the enclosure found an intact drive; that putting good drives in the enclosure made them fail.

So much for my idea of re-using the enclosure. I cracked it open anyway (it's long out of warranty) and found something even more disturbing. Inside was a Western Digital drive with a labelled capacity of 160GB.

Are they trying to achieve disk capacity from compression - and committing fraud in the bargain? Either way, I'll never use that brand again.