could you be more precise with "not work properly" and "behaving strangely" pls?
The most common thing is odd sector sizes - there's a sticky in the drives forum about how to re-format drives to 512 bytes.
Other issues range from the cosmetic (HP likes to have the disk activity LED on and blink off for activity, the opposite of normal) to more severe. In some cases, error reporting / recovery will be customized for a particular OEM and may not work properly on a generic controller.
The OEMs will tell you their drives are special sacred cows, built with super-special firmware that fixes a whole load of problems with the generic drive model. False, for 2 reasons: 1) If they reported a genuine bug to the drive manufacturer, it is very unlikely that the drive manufacturer will fix the firmware for that customer and not include the fix in future generic / other OEM firmware. 2) If the drive was that much of a piece of junk that the OEM needed to get lots of stuff fixed, why did they select it in the first place? Most of this is just a variant of vendor lock-in as is done with network SFP / SFP+ parts - if you don't used a "blessed" part, it won't work. Some OEMs are more tolerant of this than others - recent Dell RAID [advertising link, not mine] controllers will just warn that a drive isn't a Dell-certified one, but will let you use it as normal.
