The one Dell that had a warranty replacement, Dell replaced it with a Western Digital Caviar. I am not sure what the exact Model is because I don’t have the computer anymore, my friend has it now. He's been constantly running it and has been working for a 1 ½ years with out any problems. When I had it, I noticed that the drive wasn’t as fast as the Deathstar. But I’ve heard that these drives are reliable.
FYI – One intriguing development at Western Digital is that if you are willing to go with a Serial ATA controller– Western Digital is coming out with a 10,000 RPM Serial ATA Drive – 1.2 million hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), 5.2 milliseconds (ms) average seek time and a five-year warranty. Not sure the real reliability and what the price would be – but very intriguing.
On my other computers, the RMA replacement drives I received, I unloaded except for one (they sent me a 180GXP – this drive is physically different from the other GXP’s and the service guy at Hitachi told me that they are modeled off their SCSI drives and are tougher – So I figure why not and give it a try because I like their speed). I ended up replacing the other drives with a couple of Maxtor Drives- because I’ve had good luck with them.
The first Maxtor drive I bought is a DiamondMax Plus D740X (6L040J2). I found it to be kind of noisy - It makes a unbalanced vibration sound. But it has been working for a year now with out any trouble. The second Maxtor Drive I bought is the DiamondMax Plus 9 (6Y080P0). It has been running constantly for 4 months now. This drive runs quiet because of the fluid damper and has an 8 mb cache buffer. I do a lot of Database work and in my view both the drives are not as fast as the Deathstars. But, I really like the DiamondMax Plus 9 – it’s quiet and is close to the speed as the Deathstars.
I hope this info will help – Good luck.