i think hd is mainly a hit and miss thing. some ppl swear by WD and say Maxtor is craps but i think it's the luck of the draw.

my 60gb maxtor bought in 2001 is still working fine now and has found new life in xbox. even more reliable are those quantum fireballs released back in late 90s. i still have a couple running steadily in my grunt workstations too bad quantum had to close shop.

in my 10+ years of computing, i've had 2 hd failures, one was many years ago (cant remember what brand) while the other was my WD80 which conked out last year. i also had many misadventures with spoilt partitions, corrupted data etc so nowadays i am quite paranoid and have a decent (hopefully!) backup plan in place already. 1 huge 320gb hd to backup the other 2 smaller ones...hahaha.

used it only 6mths or so before it conked. and i was using it very sparingly too, just used it to store the os and apps only. temp directory and swap file was set to another disk. i also avoid p2p on this disk and instead use my maxtor. yet it still conked.....

so dont worry, like i say, its mostly luck of the draw. just make sure you have some sort of backup plan in place....