Well, I went the Maxtor route....and I'm already regretting it! I've just finished partitioning it, reinstalled win2k on it and while I was copying the data from my trusted WD 100JB drive onto it it crashed while copying.
It rebooted and windows is completely FUBAR. Doesn't even boot anymore. At first sight the drive still functions and I *could* just reinstall windows and see how it goes now, but I think I'll pass.

I'll bring it back to the shops tomorrow and order a WD 200Gb, noise and all. (I need this space, otherwise I would go for a 180gig IBM which also has a FDB motor)
The low noise option will have to wait until WD presents it's drives with FDB motors of IBM makes bigger drives than 180gig.

And I absolutely SWEAR (hand on my heart) that I will NEVER buy another Maxtor drive in my entire life. EVER! This is the third time in one year I've had problems with their drives, and it's just not worth it. The glory days of quantum are definitely over!

/end rant.

Update : I reinstalled windows after all -went smooth- and began copying the files again. Only this time I unchecked the option in win2k's setup of rebooting when it encounters a mistake. And yeah : the thing crashed again, and I believe at almost the exact same point in the copy.
I now have a nice blue screen saying a lot of hexadecimal codes and KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR

Anybody has any idea what this means? I have no idea why this would happen. It's a completely fresh install, no drivers of any kind have even been installed yet. (I figured I'd re-copy my old drives to the new one before I do that because that drive also contains most of the drivers of my devices)
The drive I'm copying from is my mp3 backup drive with only my mp3 collection on it. (yes, the first thing I wanted to copy were my mp3's ) It's also a Maxtor drive but this one has never given me any problems. Yesterday I've also copied all my mp3's of it to an external firewire drive which went very smooth.

Does anybody have got any idea why this is happening ? As said before, windows is completely fubard after this. Even safe mode doesn't work anymore. (I get a BSOD saying "the register can't load the following part (file) : \SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE is damaged, not present or not writable")
Only thing left to do is to completely re-install win2k. But I don't know if I'm willing to do this, the error seems consistent enough to assume there is something wrong with this new drive.
The strange thing is that it hasn't given me any error while installing win2k, not the first time and also not when I've just re-installed it after that first crash.