As for drives...
Honestly, it's really a myth anymore about drive quality when you're talking the cheap EIDE drives found in most stores. I used to be an on-call tech for a local shop, and he had gone through every brand out there: Seagate, WD, Maxtor, Quantum, etc. and had the same results. He'd buy 10 at a time, and he'd have to send back at most 2 out of each lot. The problem is that manufacturers are trying to mass-market cheap hardware these days, and that means the hardware sold to regular end-users is less quality than what it was 5 to 10 years ago.
If I were you, I'd find whatever manufacturer has the longest warranty on their drives, and go with them.
As far as Seagate: When I worked at a tech shop a few years back, my job was to bring these small Intel Net PCs up to spec for use in the medical industry. We'd run extensive burn-in testing on the systems (12+ hours) and then replace anything that failed, if possible. While I saw a lot of dead Seagate drives, we never had a problem getting them replaced under warranty. Keep in mind, these systems had been running non-stop for at least 2 years, probably with extensive disk usage as they were the sort of machines used in ultrasound and heart monitoring machines. They probably kept logs of everything.
I also can't speak bad about WD. I have a WD 20G drive in my system now, and it's given me no problems at all. We used to only offer WD drives to our 'low-end' builds in that same shop, and again - it was maybe 1 or 2 out of every 10 that were Dead On Delivery. We also backed our machines for hardware for a year in-house, and offered assistance with getting out-of-house warranty replacements (customer paid for labor). Again, never really saw any of the machines we built come back with hard drive issues.
The one brand everyone has had bad things to say about is Maxtor. I can't speak from experience here, as I've never owned one, but I've seen many dead maxtors floating around various shops I've worked at/been to.
Hope any of this helps. :P
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