This has been my experience...
IBM 75GXP 75GB (ATA-100, 7200RPM, 2MB): a deathstar, worked well for two years and then died slowly over a period of two months. It still works occasionally if I plug it in, although it now has an extremely loud vacuum cleaner like bearing noise that can be heard around the house.
Seagate 120GB (ATA-100, 7200RPM, 8MB): worked for about two weeks, then simply refused to be detected by the IDE controller. No idea what happened, but I just returned it for a refund.
Maxtor DM9 160GB (ATA-133, 7200RPM, 8MB): worked for about a year. Started acting weird at one point and the computer kept hanging during any disk access for a while; one day I just got a bunch of SMART errors when loading up windows. Lost all my PI campaign stuff and never managed to recover much from it.
Maxtor DM9 200GB (ATA-133, 7200RPM, 8MB): replacement for above drive that is working well so far, used in my main box. It's been about six months. The actual size is 203GB and about 89GB is used up. Most of the crap belongs to my brother though. Runs 24/7.
Some old Mac 160MB SCSI disk: still going strong after 15 years. That is what I call high quality. Slow as hell by today's standards though.
Quantum Bigfoot TS 19GB (ATA-33, 4000RPM, 2MB): weird looking 5.25" drive. Have had it for 7 years and never had a single problem. Currently used in my backup / retro game machine.
Anyway, I would say just get any 160GB 7200RPM 8MB cache drive. The 160GB models cost about $70-80, are pretty fast and seem to have the best price/capacity ratio at the moment. There are some faster/bigger drives out there, like the Maxtor 300GB 16MB cache disk (would be my choice if I was buying now), the 74GB Raptor and the Hitachi 500GB, but those all cost considerably more. SATA drives are only about $4 more than PATA ones, but at the same time they don't have any inherent advantages apart from cleaner cables. Last I checked Seagate had a longer warranty on their consumer drives than the other major companies, although that doesn't necessarily mean they are more reliable. I don't think any of the major manufacturers is really any more reliable than the others.
That was a long post, but I needed something to do while I was waiting for this graph render to finish.
