Heh, I love how around every 1 to 2 years this board has a hard drive debate. In all the previous threads it seems like there's been one person who, for example, swears by Western Digital because they had 10 Seagate drives fail on them in two years, and then it seems like there's someone with the exact opposite experience. I want to say that Rob R hated Western Digital or something...

I understand why they didn't, but I wish Google had released the results of their hard drive failure analysis. I think they indicated a fairly clear winner.

Anyway, these days I find myself going almost completely by price, as long as it isn't my main drive. Anything valuable is backed up, and anything that isn't is just a minor annoyance when/if it's lost. However, given a choice I'd probably go with Western Digital. They make good products, and their external drives are incredible. I have two 500GB USB drives that are silent from about 1ft.