I could've sworn by WD drives until I bough a pair of WD5000AAKS for my RAID-1 storage combo 2 years ago. I have actually then switched to 2 separate storage drives with rsync mirroring script running every night. It was an awesome idea to keep some redundancy cause the drives started dying one after another.
I have a 3rd one of the infamous WD5000AAKSs going south now as we speak This is a replacement sent to me by WD. So in total the two originally purchased ones are gone back to WD. The replacement for one of them is dying as we speak. I am currently running fsck as bad sectors started turning up. S.M.A.R.T test (the extened one) would not even complete within 12 hours.
So far noted: 200 Write Error Rate is at 82105, 197 Current Pending Sector Count is at: 1383

Which drives should I buy as a replacement for the WD5000AAKS crap. Is there anything more reliable nowaday. I'm talking about drives dying after few months of light use.

BTW: I use surge protected power bars and reliable power supplies with all my systems. Wtf is going on with hard disk industry anyway?

you get what you pay for. When 'average joe' ask for more reliable drive, I have alternatives but they start yelling as they cost up to 30 percent more - I gave up. They prefer to spend on DR when it happens instead of investing on redundancy and quality.

DR scene LOVES Tornado =)

ROYL HAWK PINCLITE and co. too, to be honest...