Originally Posted by
complich8
Basically, there's 6 manufacturers making hard drives right now: Fujitsu, Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital. Fujitsu mainly (by which I mean only) makes scsi and sata stuff, and are generally enterprise-targetted, which generally means uncommon for home users. Hitachi is still fighting the "IBM DeathStar" name, but makes a quality product these days. Maxtor is everyone's favorite "my maxtor disk failed" anecdote, because they make so damned many disks that they're everywhere -- of course you'll find more failures in a larger sample. Samsung .... well, nobody has much to say about them. Seagate's well-trusted but makes slightly slower disks in general. Western digital is known for noisy but functional and reasonably fast disks.
So basically, of the 4 real choices (discounting fujitsu for not making IDE drives, and samsung for being memory-price-fixing sonsofbitches), there's not a whole lot of difference. Western digital drives may be noisier. Maxtors may be hit or miss. Seagates may be slower performers on average. Hitachis have an undeserved bad rep.
There's no real difference between any of them. Get one of those four brands, and your chances are as good as if you got any of the others. Just make sure the interface is the right type, and that it's got a decent buffer size.