Western Digital hard drive hell

So I try to mix up the brands of hard drive I buy, just in case one brand turns out to have problems in the long term.

Of the drives that have died, I lost one Seagate after a lot of moving about and, more recently, two Western Digital drives.  And I try to avoid buying IBM... now Hitachi.... after the DeathStar thing.

The first one I've already griped about.

The second one is one of my two photo drives, which has me a bit upset.  The bright side, of course, is that I've got several copies of the digital pics and at least one copy of the film pics on other media... either DVDs or another hard drive.  But I want to make absolutely positively sure that nothing's going to be lost.  Thankfully I discovered problems when the SMART monitoring went off, so I had Mrs. Wirehead copy stuff over last night from the older drive to the newer drive.

So I have a 500gb drive that was intended for me to rebuild my C: drive and the RAID-0 array onto that is now going to be used as one of the photo drives.

Of course, I'm running out of brands.  Maxtor was picked up by Seagate, I don't quite trust Hitachi, and I don't qute trust Samsung.  So it's WD vs. Seagate... and Seagate seems to be more reliable.