My years of experience in repairing computers both new and old as a tech at CompUSA, and Computer City before them (and my own personal experiences as well as those of various friends) has been that there is no reliable hard drive brand or model, really. I have seen them all die, sometimes in batches, sometimes ones-and-twos, some early and some years down the road but with little power-on-time.
I'd just get whatever seems convenient and cost-effective, then RAID them as a mirror. Preferably buy extras so you can swap one out periodically to rebuild the array onto the new one from the one left in the array, then keep the old one in storage, and swap them back and forth that way to make backups as images of the drive itself. Then if tragedy strikes and you lose all the drives still physically in the array you still have the others to plug in.
Plus your usual backup methods, of course, in case the RAID controller itself dies, leaving you unable to read any of the drives.
I've seen even crappy drives live forever, and have a pair of those in my computer now, raided as a mirror for the last 3+ years--Samsung 300GB SATA. I hated that brand for years due to many problems, and even the series and model of drive I am using has died for lots of people I've helped, but on mine they just keep going. Of course, now that I've said that they'll die tonight, but for now they're still going.
On 12-7-2007 I had several drives of different ages, manufacturers, models, and interface types fail within hours of each other, for no explicable reason. Some were in computers, and some were in external cases via USB with their own power supplies, and they were on three different circuits in the house, too. Naturally, I was in the process of a network-wide backup and data shuffle, and at the moment failures began had just been moving some data from one computer to a more relevant one, having finished moving data from the latter to the former to make room. Naturally, it was mostly drives that had the only current copy of data on them that failed, and all of them failed in ways that left me unable to even use Spinrite to recover them (most were no longer even detected by the BIOS, due to constant resets). I did eventually recover one by swapping boards with one I later found at a thrift store of the same model, but that was an exceptional fluke.
Most of the data is simply gone, but none of it was super-important (which is why it was being manipulated that way without a proper backup of it first).
Given all that, I tend to trust Seagate more than other brands, but I have no experience at all with anything above 500GB drives, as I have tried to stay out of the computer repair business on a personal level since CompUSA shutdown (and have been unable to get a job in the field--not that I'd want one anyway).
