Still WD black
Its design make it last longer and always outperform current blue and green model.

If few years ago we might recommend samsung, but............

It used to be Hitachi but at the moment there's only Seagate and WD with very little involvement from Toshiba to carry on what's left off Hitachi. If you want Seagate's reliable line of drives, look at their Constellation series. For WD, it's their Black series or their RE4 series. Both are expensive but reliable.

But then again if you're looking at storing and keeping the hardisk locked away after one time use, any decent brand would be fine.
Hardisk would be fine for long term storage if you take into consideration the price per GB and the speed. Tape is expensive while still slow.

If the data is very important, make an exact copy of your backup in another hardisk and keep it somewhere else. From time to time, take the hardisk out and check the files at random to see if the hardisk is ok.

Ignore the RPM. 5400RPM may seem slow, but it is perfectly serviceable for most needs. Furthemore, gigabit ethernet has a speed limit of 100MB/s, which 5400RPM drives can exceed.
Blu-ray is likely to be more fragile than DVD. You know how SSD's write lifespan has reduced as they keep on shrinking the circuitry? Blu-ray has a lot tinier data holes than DVD do. Unless they have some new technique to maintain or improve on the lifespan I wouldn't bet my family photo albums on it.

I would buy the Reds instead of RE4 or Black. Much lower initial cost and replacing failed drives would be a lot less painful. You could buy two Reds for almost the price of one RE4, with which you could RAID-1!

u looking for 500gb or 1tb? i just bought myself re4 500gb last yr, while 2 of my neighbour got themselves each 500gb re4 as well. re4 got 5yr wrty if not mistaken, really worth it actually.

People are actually backing up their Blurays onto hardisk. What does that tell you? 

Actually, the choice to use RE4 or Black depends on whether you use it with RAID or standalone. The RE4 is specifically for use with RAID array and if you're not going to use RAID, Black series is better. If you use the RE4 as a standalone drive, they have very short write recovery times (TLER = 7 seconds), which can result in data corruption if they not used with a write caching RAID controller. The short write recovery times also ensure that the drives would never get into a lock up for long time for the RAID controller to register an error and subsequently drop them out of the array.

Black series is RE4 with longer TLER (approx 180 seconds). Having said that, a lot od people use the Black series in RAID arrays and don't encounter problems.
Yeah, I'm aware that current geenration 5400 rpm drives are speedy. I'm actually using 8 x 2TB Samsung HD204UI and I love them because it's silent and they are as fast as (if not faster than) other 7200 rpm drives. The thing is I plan to go beyond 1Gb/s in the near future and it would be nice if the drives could cope. Having said that, I think the Red in a RAID array would still able to cope beyond Gigabit. Aiming for 300 to 400 MB/s transfer speeds in a RAID array.
Agreed. But I think it's not exactly 2 times the price. Black series is generally about 40% more expensive than Red. 5 years vs 3 years warranty makes the difference too.
Sorry. No idea. I'm guessing it's much shorter like the RE4 (TLER = 7 seconds).

Been sent my Samsung drive to Seagate for 3weeks but until now still do not have any news for it. What number should I call to check with them ?

New price for SG 3TB at viewnet.. RM459!

from my research, that seems to be true in terms of reliability..but the stock for 2TB 7k3000 drives are very rare already since WD took over..u can try to search for it in LYP though..

FROM IPOH dealer actually green is around RM460 dealer price. =D B2B order and need to cover the postage.

Yeah, when I look at their external drive, their supposed 5-year on retail external drive now drop to only 1-year, darn, no more Seagate for me.

Ah my bad...   was only looking at that one model, here's the link.
http://www.seagate.com/external-hard-drive...nsion-portable/
Was darn disappointed, well the others are not quite long anyway, either 2-year or 3-year, depends on model, very confusing IMO.

Yes you can, but it's recommended to RAID 2 of the very same model/brand.
If you plan on RAID on 2 different model/brand then use software RAID, this should available through FreeNAS or Windows Server (2003/2008), but this kind of RAID rely on software and the speed is much slower due to the extra CPU overhead.
I'm not too sure about those branded (Synology, QNAP, etc.) NAS system RAID, probably uses software as well? I'll leave this to those NAS owners.

Capacity wise, it does not matter, for you'll lose space on the larger capacity hard disk.
Example, you have 2 hard disk on RAID1, 500GB & 750GB, the 750GB will only used the 500GB and the rest, useless, this apply to hardware RAID.
With software RAID (Windows Server), you can utilize the extra space for something else, though I won't recommend you to do this.

planning to build my own home server for store all the files.
cos i only left with notebook.
currently my existing data is around 11TB with 2TB filled out in around 3-5 month.....
not necessary 12 drive cos also tight on budget...
just want a backup/redundancy cos recently my harddisk failing 1 by 1....
also dont know how come all fail at the same time...

last time 5 drive on 1 desktop pc,
1 on external casing, 1 on dlink 310 (usb mode).
for external only when i using it ( when i start the pc)

the psu is gigabyte superb 720 ( 80 plus )
some movie/data i can get back but almost 50% is rare files which hard to get....
planning to use nas but for large drive (4 drive up) most is very expensive....

5400rpm
WD Red - 3 years warranty

7200rpm
Seagate Barracuda - 1 year warranty
Seagate SV35 (this is an AV drive) - 3 years warranty

The Reds are best for RAID duties or storing huge files, like movies, because its access time is slower than the Greens (slow random read/write).

If you want to store photos or songs, the Greens should have better performance because its access time is faster than the Reds.
RM649 for WD RE4 2TB.

from what i've learned green drives are designed for huge start stop count before failure and re4 and av drives are meant for 24/7 operation but with lesser tolerance of start stop count.huge transfer speeds are also useless for one way only traffic. for this reason alone i took the green.