I'll go back to WD

Bad move in my opinion. I can remeber back in the <1GB days when WD was the best and Maxtor was the worst. Now, it is the exact oposite. If I can help it, I stay as far away from WD as possible.

WD had a 6GB IDE drive (Caviar 36000 i believe) that I had to RMA many of. Then, I had 10GB SCSI drives in a RAID5 array. 4 out of 6 eventually died. That machine has Seagates in it now that have been running for the past 2-3 years without issue.

Currently, my default hard disk brand is Maxtor. If cost is an issue, I think Samsung is making some excellent (fast & silent) drives these days. I've been staying away from IBM drives (my old favorite) since they admitted their drives should not be run for more than 8 hours per day. IBM also screwed me on an RMA once.