Buy 2 units of WD Blue and create a RAID-1 array with them. Sounds expensive but your chance of data loss is almost reduced to 0% .

These days, very hard to trust the HDD already. When it wants to die, it will die out of a sudden. Means suddenly cannot detect    Then all data lost. Those lucky ones might have symptoms like clicking noise, sudden performance drop etc..

I don't think that's reliability that everyone is recommending, it's the warranty, 5-year is great if you want to keep it for longer time.
But WD Black is quite hot compared to other series and good cooling is required to properly cool it off, otherwise WD Black is good for its performance as well.

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Added on November 9, 2012, 8:05 am
Um, no one replying?
For laptop, I would recommend SSD for much reliability (check SSD thread).
For HDD, there's no "reliable" in them, just take the most value and 7200rpm if you want some good response speed.

We are looking more on Warranty than durability these days. Eversince the flood , it's rather questionable did they really recover from the losses. It might probably signify the possibility of reducing material cost and warranty period to cover up what they lost. When and how precisely these HDD will fail , i believe that those manufacturer knew about it very well.Of course these will be kept in the dark.
Consumers weren't fools either. We are very well awared that the quality WD and Seagate been producing after the flood is unreliable.
That's why warranty wise triumph over anything else. These manufacturers knew it too. It's them who move us to their direction.

Agreed on SSD. It's not only theoritically fast but it should be durable and better than HDD. But when these manufacturers tries to get these product on the market, I'm sure "material cost" and "price" will be put into consideration over how well it matches to advertised usefulness. Same like car. 1.8 should be theoretically powerful than 1.3 cars. But if u compare proton 1.6 vs honda 1.3 car. U'll see. Can run very fast of course, but ends up more oftenly in workshop