Seagate. Still not a 100% guarantee but I have had less failures with them than WD or Maxtor (even if Seagate owns Maxtor now).

It looks like that Seagate is the winner & Western Digital drives than any other. Whatever you do, DON'T, REPEAT DON'T use Samsung hard drives. There is definitely something wrong in their manufacturing techniques. I had over 15 of their drives all of which failed within 150 hours. Of course they were replaced under warranty. But I never used them for anything important again. Their CD/DVD cutters/burners don't appear to suffer the same reliability problems as their hard drives.

It also appears that for Alesis HD 24 users that Seagate appears to be the most friendly. At least until recently when they too seem to have changed something in their manufacturing technique and/or parts, assuming you can find any of their IDE drives anymore. To date, there has been no real success in utilizing SATA drives with an adapter for the HD 24. So hang on to your old IDE drives if you anticipate purchasing one of those machines.

Coming soon, CROW MOBILE/CROW AUDIO VIDEO.
Ms. Remy Ann David

Remy, I've had some luck with the HD24 by just pulling the jumper off the pins altogether. Had two drives that would lock up at 70% and after removing the jumper they load fine now.

Seagate has a 5 year warranty too. the others are 3 iirc.

Seagate

I might suggest perusing the articles, comparisons and evaluations available on Tom's Hardware.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/

I get a chuckle out of so many categorically listing manufacturers where there are so many variables among the various formats, be it IDE, SCSI, SATA and 2.5 and 3.5" drives, 5400, 7200, 10,000+ rpm, for use internally or externally in small passively cooled cases or in NAS - as different individual model drives vary in temperature as well... - not to mention SSD drives!

I am almost surprised someone hasn't suggest broadband bass traps in all the corners and intersections... :P

I have been a huge Seagate/Maxtor fan since the first 100GB Western Digital internal IDE hard drives came out in the second half of 2001, at the same time as Windows XP first hit the market. A WD Design problem could not adequately buffer the large number of instructions that XP sent to the drive, but WD Support kept saying it was a bug in XP, even after Microsoft improved the documentation of the particular Stop error (computer halted and you had to reboot) to state that XP had not received a response to an instruction to a hard drive within an acceptable period of time.

Although perhaps not directly applicable, I am now on my 6th warranty replacement external (USB) hard drive from Seagate. This is the first time they are giving me a new drive, as opposed to a factory certified (refurbished) drive with an old firmware version running on it. So, we'll see when the drive gets here on Monday.

On the other hand, I've had 250GB and 500GB external and internal drives from Seagate that have worked flawlessly. The failing drive is 1.5TB.

There were firmware problems with 1-1.5TB internal SATA Seagate drives at the end of last year, but it sounds like they have since been resolved with newer firmware.

MS wrote: I am almost surprised someone hasn't suggest broadband bass traps in all the corners and intersections... :P

Those are only used with Lacie products.