Definitely not the WD, as it has one fourth the buffer and one third the warranty as the other two.

Have you considered stepping up to the 250 GB size though? I have found that prices are much better there, and you often find deep discounts/sales on that size. The last couple of 250GBs I bought were about $80 US, cheap enough that it made no sense to consider anything less.

Hmm, how do you like this 250Gb Samsung? Basically, what I'm looking for is what brands to gravitate to/away.
Thanks!

I like Samsung a lot. Quiet and reasonably reliable.

Hard drive recommendations are bound to be kind of iffy, though, because it's so easy for people to mistake anecdotes for data.

What are you going to use the drive for?

Work-file backups, MP3s, comicbooks. Nothing too mission critical.

Of course, I could leave the new HD as my main drive and use my current 2x40GBs for bsckups and mp3s.

You can ask 100 people which HD brands they like and you'll get 100 different answers. For every person that swears up and down how bad X is, you'll find someone else that says the same of Y and loves X. It's notoriously anecdotal.

Personally, I don't care about brands, I buy based on tangible aspects like warranty length, noise, and so on. Read reviews of drives at sites like http://www.storagereview.com/ and skip the anecdotal personal fairy tails that people will weave about how "buying X is a recipe for disaster" and such nonsense.

Like Rhomboid says, everyone has a preference...FWIW, I have nothing bad to say about Samsung, nothing good to say about WD. WD tends to supply drives to massive makers like Dell, which suggests something, I dunno...bad to me.

I have NEVER had a Seagate fail. Maxtors scare the hell out of me because everyone I know who has owned one has had one (at least) fail.

I say go Seagate.

Yeah, maybe consider using the new drive for your main drive. The new one will probably perform better. And if I understand correctly, it seems like it would be a bigger deal for you to lose your os partition than it would be for you to lose your backup/comic/etc. drive.

(FWIW, I, like Rhomboid, try to buy based on tangible aspects--for me, noise is a big thing. And I think, possibly mistakenly, that a quiet drive is likely to also be durable and well-engineered.)

I have had two WD drives die on me. None of the other brands that I have tried have died so far. Currently have 2 IBM drives but I want to either ditch the smaller one and replace it with at least a 250GB or just add a larger drive if that works. But I think I need to ditch one of the current ones.

box: actually, the really big deal for me would be to lose my projects folder, which I'm thinking of setting up to be automatically backed up either from or to the new drive.
I might switch the OS to a partition on the new drive as it's faster than my current ones.
Is there any way a)copy over the OS+programs b)switch the letters on the drives, so I can get a 100% transparent switch over?

I recently had a 3-mo-old Samsung die on me. Very quiet drive, but the shop said they had been getting a lot back as defective. I replaced it with a Seagate, which they said was their most reliable brand.

To move your stuff: use a disk imaging program like Norton Ghost.

Drive letters you assign in your bios settings. Right as the machine boots, there will be a "Hit this key to enter BIOS"-type message. Consult your motherboard manual for details.

bonehead: gotcha, thanks!