I used to swear by WDs about six years ago, and then I experienced a string of failures on WDs in the PCs I was working on. My father had a couple of them in one system and they both failed. The copper pathways lifted up off the pc board on the underside of the drive. It was very weird and difficult to fix.
Now I\'ve switched over to Maxtors, and had fairly good luck with them. They are a hell of a lot quieter than WDs also. Who knows, maybe these will fail in a couple years also. You just have to back up your stuff obsessively.