Hard drives wear out. It sucks! There is nothing you can do about it. I've never noticed one brand being any better than another brand. In other words, I've had Western Digital, Maxtor, Seagate, and IBM all crash on me at one point or another.

I usually pick up Maxtor's locally at Staples because they will have mega awesome sales every once in a while.

With hard drives there are ATA hard drives that have been around for a while. This is what I've always used and I've never had a problem with performance. These are the least expensive hard drives out there these days.

There are also SATA which means Serial ATA. These are capable of handling more tracks simultaneously, but I've never been able to max out my ATA drives. So, SATA may be a little overkill.

Hard drives also have an RPM at which they spin. I've always been fine using 7200 rpm hard drives.

I'm of the opinion that standard hard drives have surpassed the needs of audio. So unless you are recording at high sample rates or something (I never bothered) you should be just fine with a standard, over the counter, hard drive.

I always recommend a 3 hard drive setup. Pickup a small hard drive for your C: drive. I used a 20GB for my C: drive until it died on my a few months ago. I think I have a 60GB for my C: drive that I'm using almost nothing of. (I keep my C: drives very clean). I recommend a separate drive for audio. This should probably be a fairly large hard drive. I recommend a third drive to backup your audio data onto. I don't use RAID or anything fancy. I just have copy and paste a folder I worked on onto my backup drive when the session is over.