Over the years I've built 4 pc's and mainly due to price consideration at the time of each used Maxtor hard drives in three of the four. The single exception being a Western Digital. The only failure I've ever had was on a Western Digital drive. The PC I'm writing this from right now is still using an old 40 Gig Maxtor Diamondmax ATA 133 as the primary drive for housing the operating system. That isn't to say that Western Digital is producing poor products. For the last 6 years I've had good luck with those as well and currently have a 200 Gig Western Digital also in this PC.
My experience has been that so long as you pick out a hard drive with current technology, right now that would probably be an SATA drive. Get as large as a cache on the drive as there is on the market. And buy from someplace that you don't have to worry about bogus repackaging, you're going to be fine.
http://www.sharkeyextreme.com is a great enthusiasts hardware site. While their focus is on gaming, if your machine can handle all the latest games, it's going to easily handle nearly anything else. The maintain building guides with specific hardware recommendations for Value, High End and Extreme systems, updating each every two or three months.
They also maintain pricing guides for key pieces of hardware such as CPU, Memory, Video Cards, Hard Drives, etc. Here is a link to the most recent pricing guide for Hard Disk drives:
http://www.sharkyextreme.com/guides/article.php/3702416I've built two systems using their guides as a baseline and haven't found their advice to be bad yet on a single product.
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