I used to be a diehard fan of IBM (now Hitachi) IDE HD's but I keep finding more reasons not to like them, have had 2 (possibly 3) fail now recently. A 15gig at home which was my primary C:, a 75gig at work in our network backup machine, both kept getting corrupt sectors, the other drive appears to have stopped functioning completely just today, no longer showing up upon boot (a 30 gig), I haven't checked it out yet but possibly a power issue.
I am searching for a replacement and am wondering what the consensus is on who's currently making the best IDE drives? I need drives for machines that run 24 hours with various uses from nightly backup to light web and ftp service to audio editing.
I recently looked at Samsung drives which look good to me, but I need some real world opinions. I have never really heard anything good about Western Digital, some good things about Maxtor, and I don't know much about Seagate. Are there any other mfg's I should look at? For reference I don't intend to spend much more than $80 for an 80 gig bare drive (7200 rpm, 2mb cache), I can buy the Hitachi and Samsung drives for this price.