hehehe that depends on opinion and the experience of who you ask. The most unbiased answer is that all hard drives will fail sooner or later simply because it has moving parts. I've got a WD 20 gig, a samsung 40 gig, a maxtor 80, and a maxtor 120gig. Out of the bunch of them the Samsung is the most quiet drive. The maxtor's on a random read are the second noisest and the WD is the worst for sound and it's slow but I've had it for so long it's out of warrenty so it's old technology. My WD had some bad clusters and thier software fixed it, the 80 gig maxtor also had some bad clusters here recently and something happened with the smart controller and needed to get replaced. I don't think brand really matters that much in today's world, what matters is your backup strategy for when things do go wroung, and believe me they will go wrong regardless of brand, speed, and cache.
In today's market getting any of the drives with 8mb cache, also means it comes with a 3 year warranty for replacement. I would get one of them simply because the warranty means I'm not out of money in a single year and 3 years from now they will have better drives that I might get as a replacement.
GK
Yes, I made it past newbie w00t.