I try and stick with WD but I've tried a few Hitachi and Samsung drives and while it's not a huge sample they've been okay.
Nothing at all like the failure rate I saw on the Seagate drives about two years ago before I finally threw in the towel and gave up on them.
It just got too frustrating when the replacement drive failed....talk about junk.
Actually years ago the worst hard drives were the IBM then Hitachi drives.
All of the manufactures have had higher failure rates with drives above 500 Gigs than drives below that capacity. This is probably heat related since the larger the drive’s capacity the more work it has to do to retreive the data.
I have always followed this policy for my computers. The First or main drive, no more than 250 gigs split in two equal partitions. One for the OS and Programs, the other for a hidden backup using Acronis True Image.
THen all of my files, pictures, music and other stuff is stored on a second drive of 500 gigs or less. Finally I keep a backup of hte computer and all of the files, music, pictures on an external drive that I update once a month.