Actually, depending on how hard core what you need to do is, you should get 3. 1 holds system/applcations, 2 and 3 should be fast(10k rpm) drives in a stripped raid config. (raid 0 I beleive). This setup allows you to edit very high resolution video without stuttering.

I used to adore IBM harddisk. I had many of them since the mid 90s. But my area does not have IBM anymore so I've sine switch to Seagate. They are pretty alright and the price is reasonable.

I've got 2 Samsung spinpoint harddisks, they are good, fast and cheap.... Don't have much to say about it.

I use SeaGate so it's Seagate for me. Never experienced any problems with it. That's all I have to say.

my friends like maxtor quite a lot so when i needed to get a new harddisk drive with loads more space, i decided to get a maxtor even though it was more expensive than usuals like seagate. well guess what....... after taking one whole day to transfer all my data to the maxtor and then formatting the other harddisk drives, i was enjoying the additional space and suddenly it died.

PSU was working fine so it couldn't have been power. i hooked up the 3rd harddisk drive and it worked fine. i tried hooked up the maxtor to my sister's computer and it was still dead. no heat or vibrations coming from it.

maxtor's customer service was so disgusting awful - i sent an online customer service ticket and received no response from them for a week so my father brought the harddisk drive to maxtor's office for me. they replaced it with a new one but refused to revive the dead harddisk for me and said that they'd have to charge about $500 if i wanted them to retrieve my data from it.

as you can guess, i was absolutely annoyed at losing about 5 years' worth of data and important work files.

On my father's pc we had a Maxtor (Diamond I think) and it was pretty ok, although I have to admit that after a few years of use it got very noisy. Nowadays I don't see my dad anymore so I don't know how his puter or HD is doing (maybe it blew up?? Wouldn't be a great loss in the world either)

On my old pc, which I tried to overclock - for gods sake never try your first overclocking on AMD LOL - and blew up, had a Western Digital in it, 40GB at 7200RPM. Now that was a sweet drive... Even though it's size was small (at that time, which is a few years ago, it was pretty ok), the read/write speed was excellent. I ran a dual boot on it, with 3 partitions, one NTFS (Win XP Pro), one FAT32 (Data to access from Win and Linux) and one EXT2FS (Red Hat 8). I never encountered ONE problem, the only thing that did mess it up for me was fried RAM (I learned a harsh lesson here, to not buy the cheap RAM but look for quality).

Now, on this laptop, I have an IBM 12GB drive, it is slow as a snail and makes more noise than I have ever heard coming from a HD. But I blame it on the age of the disk, after all this puter is I think from 1996 or so. (IBM THinkpad 390E)

I have 2 computers running 3 Maxator harddisks and they have never had any sort of problem no matter how many times I formatted them. I haven't tried any of the others but I don't have any reason to since I already have good enough harddrives.

Has anyone EVER had a hard disk fail on them ???
i havent.

I have a 10 year old Fuji hard disk (6 Gig) and i quite often do a zero fill on the disk (much worse than a format) and its still running strong.

As for noise, you can quieten disks down by changing the read heads swing speed. (ofcourse this will sacrifice a little I/O throughput.

I think the days of theHard disk are comming to an End.
Their hot, noisy, and in-efficiant.
Non Volitile Electronic memory is getting cheaper, faster and bigger.

By the time i have kids, they probably wont believe me when i say computers werent always silent.

i dont knowmuch about harddisks or brand but i prefer the western digital as they as widely known for their reliablity and its great big size. iam new when it comes to hardware i just know the basics of the components. i think as it was like logo. the parts just fits into the spaces what theyre built for. if theyre compatable theyre work together.

ive seen really chepa harddrive now for really cheap by western digital about 260gb for only under £100 bucks. i dont know about the specifications. only know about the amount the data it holds on one disk. thats all.

I used WD 8Gb 0.5Mb cache disc. Still working today. No bad sectors, low noise. But it's to small comparing to my current HDD (Maxtor 120Gb 8Mb cache). My maxtor is running for about one year without any problems. So I'm voting for Maxtor and for WD.

Also I know that Fujitsu and Seagate produce good hard disc drives too