I have Maxtors, WDs and Seagates. My Maxtors are my most reliable drives. In this rig I have a 40gb Maxtor 6L040J2, in my HTPC I have Maxtor 54098U8 40gb and 6Y080P0 80gb HDs, in my Server I have a Maxtor 6L060J3 60gb.
My WDs are junk. I had a WDC 6gb drive that didn't like to run as Mastor or Slave to another drive, only as a Single drive. I've had 3 30gb Special Edition WDCs die on me. 1 of them was a RMAd drive.
And I'm iffy on my 2 seagates. I have a 200gb drive in this computer (ST3200822A) and a 30gb (ST330013A) boot drive in the server. Both of them are kinda flaky. They will work for weeks, months, then just randomly they reboot the computer and fail to be detected by the BIOS. It takes 2 or 3 restarts to get them back. I don't know if I will buy any more Seagates.
Maxtor FTW!