I'm looking to buy 3 1TB drives for my raid array. GIven the recent spat of bad seagate 1TB drives can anyone recommend a reliable and relatively affordable drive (~125/ea). I figure you guys would be the best place to turn to for some insight into the quality of a drive. I'm looking for a Sata II 300gb/s drive.

Thanks for your help.

7K1000.B (AKA T7K1000). It's based on the same platform as the E7K1000, which I have so far sold about 20 of them, haven't had problems yet. It's a three platter design like the E7K1000, unlike the original 7K1000 which had five, but unlike the 7K1000 and E7K1000, it only has 16MB of cache. Since you're putting it into a RAID5 (I'm guessing at least), the lack of cache won't matter as much.

I have seen it for as little as $100 US, and my E7K1000s I only pay about $150 for.

I think the Caviar Black is noisy, the caviar GP/Green is slow. The Samsung HD103UI is slow (no idea about quality), and the HD103UJ I have seen two failures with (not at the same time) in one machine (with six drives). Since the two Samsung failures were the same machine, it may have been damage in transportation, I've never seen another one in service or broken so cannot say.

I agree with Zorb, the hitachi drives are more expensive but I find them more reliable.

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I agree.

I do like the Samsung HDDs, but again have no bad words about the Hitachi