Best Quality/Most Reliable Hardrive?

[TemjinGold]

Backups are fine, but there isnt any reason I can think of for so many drives to be going bad so frequently. I've replaced my power supplies and UPS many times over the years. And the motherboard was brand new along with the hard drive.
If I didnt need a powerful Windows XP gaming machine I would just go retail with a heavy duty service plan.

Do you live in an old building? I used to live in an apartment that was over 100 years old. The wiring on the building was so old that the "Faulty Wiring" light on my UPS was constantly on and we had a brown out once/week...

 

[Obsoleet]

I wouldn't go with the Samsung F3 after reading this page and the link inside of it.
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1538360&page=3

I have a 7200.11 1TB that I had to update the firmware on and it hasn't given me many problems. Recently it hasn't wanted to spin up so I replaced my PSU and so far no problems but still looking to replace it. HDD Tune shows 3 bad sectors and 3 failed spin ups.

I'm probably going with a 7200.12 1TB. I've had good luck with Seagates for many decades now and not ready to give up on them.

What I'd like is an external RAID1 and/or NAS with USB3 and eSATA but that's not too popular yet so I'm simply waiting out some product launches. My Intel SSD is rock solid and HDDs have been relegated to storage/backups.

 

[Modelworks]

For any new drives here is what I do;
Run victoria for windows
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download5688.html

It may give an error about missing driver when you run it, just ignore it.

select the drive and the smart tab, then click get smart. It will save a smart log to the drive.
Click test tab
Run the test until it completes.
Check the smart values again and see what changed and decide if what changed matters or not.