seriously, my various drives havent died at all on me and they havent shown any symptomps of dying. What matters with HDDs is the supply of power. If the power supplied is stable the only way it's gonna fail is factory defect, and so far i havent experienced no such thing. You guys definitely have seen how many HDDs die when used with some no-name external case, havent you.
I use 11 HDDs from various brands (Samsung, WD, Seagate, Fujitsu) on my PC and they have been running well for about 4 years now.
All i care about buying HDD is the price per gig, then performance, then compatibility (i still remember the case with maxtor and nF4 back then). I think right now, aside from the performance, 1.5TB HDD looks good for the price. 2TB is still quite expensive.