A month or two ago, one of my external hard drives (Iomega brand external with Hitachi brand internal drive) completely failed, no recovery outside of some of those $1000 services.  So with no luck on that...looking for a new hard drive and trying to find the most reliable one.

Any suggestions from the PC people here? 

i like western digital, I use both internal and external and never have any problems.

Seagate is pretty reliable too.

I hate seagates.

Ive had every one fail that I baught over the size of 200gb.

SO for bigger drivers I tried a samsung with its ball bearing tech thing and they run much quieter and all still working, got 4 of them.

 Western Digital has been pretty much the standard. They've never steered me wrong.

Hitachi, Samsung, Western Digital, and Seagate.

there is a temporary way of fixing harddrives.
try throwing your dead harddrive in the freezer wrapped in news paper and plastic.
leave overnight and copy your files.
how long was your harddrive in service BTW?
Id cry if my extenal died on me and Id lose all my files and data.
I cant live without my 100gb porn stash

I've been using Western Digital and Samsung hard drives for years, I knew Western Digital were reliable enough but I'm extremely pleasantly surprised at how good Samsung's hard drives are as well, cheap too!

WD and Seagate...

Kingston