At least your drive is failing in a nice way. I bought a removable IDE cage for my DishPlayer PVR drive, and the day I got the cage, the PVR drive died, taking 20 hours of TV I wanted to archive. It's really noisy when it spins, and does the painful to hear click of death.

As far as brands, I go with the general trend at the time. Though the bad days of Maxtor still make me bitter enough to avoid them most of the time.

IBM is the drive maker I am currently looking at though. Tag Command Queuing in an IDE drive sounds awesome.