The only ones I'd avoid are the IBM's, particularly any 75GXP's still in stock. Lots of problems and denials, class action lawsuit, etc.
Worked on a friend's machine recently that has a Maxtor and a WD. The interesting thing about this modern maxtor is that it's slimmer top to bottom, probably a good thing for stacked drive installations as it would obviously be easier to cool.
Other than that, take the best deal you can find between Maxtor, WD and Seagate in the rpm/buffer/capacity category you want. The Seagates are supposedly the quietest, although the competition certainly isn't noisy. Any real world performance differences between similar drives are mostly wishful thinking. After that, it's pretty much the luck of the draw- a small % of any manufacturer's drives will fail prematurely.