I second the
in regards to recent manufacture WD drives. I've had 2 die on me within the last 2 years, and heard about plenty more problems. I ran Maxtors until about a year ago when I found Samsungs. While I still keep a couple ultra-thin Maxtors in a RAID 0 config off of a PCI ATA-133 card (for Premiere to scratch), I now run Samsung SATA's in RAID 1 on a 64bit-66mhz card for general storage. They are pretty darn quiet. I've got manual control of all fans in the case (5 case, 2 CPU, 1 Vid, 2 PSU, 1 NB), so I can back it off and get nothing but drive noise. The older WD 60BB that I still run my OS on is the noisiest of the bunch, followed by the Maxtor DX9s, followed by a WD 80JB, followed by the Samsung 160's. A 3-year warranty on the Samsungs for the same price as the other brands, plus decent reviews, sold me. In a RAID 1 config they are still almost as fast as the older Maxtors on RAID 0, but I suspect the interface speed has a lot to do with it. I'd like to run my OS on a Raptor, but just can't justify it yet.