I'm looking for a new hard drive. I currently have these installed:

Western Digital Caviar SE WDC WD2000JB-00KFA0 200 GB (IDE, x2)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 350 GB (SATA)
Western Digital Caviar Black WDC WD6401AALS-00L3B2 640 GB (SATA)

I want to replace the two 200 GB IDE drives and the 350 GB one for a single SATA drive, however, I don't know which one to choose. So uh, could someone offer suggestions? The only limits are:

A) Available from Amazon.com
B) Doesn't cost over $100
C) Doesn't require an alignment tool to be used under Windows XP since I plan to upgrade to Windows 7 in the near future.

I'm thinking I -might- keep one of the 200 GB drives as a boot drive for now, and move the 200 GB and 350 GB drives to external HD enclosures for data / music backup.

Got suggestions? Lemme know! :)

I would definitely agree with keeping one of your existing drives for your operating system. The drive with your OS on it is the one most likely to fail due to the constant use it's under. So keeping anything important on a separate physical drive has its advantages. Possibly the best drive for this would be the 320GB as chances are it's marginally faster than the 200GB drives.

Secondly I'm not sure why there's such a discrepancy between the drives you have chosen, but the third option, the Caviar Black would seem to be the best of the three.

That said, in this neck of the woods at least, it's very difficult to find a drive below 1TB that's suitably cheaper. 1TB is definitely the optimal bang for buck drive size at the moment.

The drives listed are those he already has. Caviar Black one is one of them, I see it mentioned nowhere else.

I have good experience with Western Digital Green series and I believe 1 TB should be easily available for less than 100 bucks. (I don't know how about Amazon but in czech stores even 1,5 TB WD15EARS Green is under 100 dollars)

I'm taking out the 350 GB drive because it has firmware issues. Some of them simply die out, so I want to update the firmware before using it as a data drive again.

To do that, I have to back up all of its contents to another drive - the new one. One that's done, I simply put everything back to where it was. :)

I would get another Caviar Black; hasn't yours been great thus far? Why not have another?

Well, for one thing, they're friggin' expensive!

Okay, for comparison, look at Amazon. The prices are:

1 TB Caviar Green: $54.99
1 TB Caviar Blue: $59.99
1 TB Caviar Black: $84.99

Since Greens are supposed to be energy efficient, Blues are general purpose, and Blacks are Performance... I figured I'd go with a Blue drive. But then I searched and found that WD never made any Caviar Blues larger than 1 TB!

Amazon has 2 TB Caviar Greens for $79.99, and 2 TB Caviar Blacks for $164.99. It's like they decided to screw over the middle ground users like myself... I'm tempted to go with a Caviar Green but I've read that the drives can be... iffy at times because of how they save power. So I'm a bit scared of that.

That's absolutely true, but from my point of view (which is biased toward performance) the 1TB Caviar Black is the answer to your question. How much of an issue is size? The fact that you bring up 2TB drives makes it seem as though that's indeed what you'd like, and yeah, the 2TB CB is expensive. I wouldn't mess around with the Greens though, it sounds like getting those is asking for trouble, as you've come across.

I don't really mind "slow" hard drives. What matters to me the most is that it won't die out on me after a few years.

Plus I'd rather spend the difference on something else, like ANOTHER HARD DRIVE. :p

Your problem is pretty clearly based in a failure on Western Digital's part as you said, which is a shame. My experience with the two 1TB Caviar Blacks I have has been fantastic, so I am kind of loyal to WD. If the Blues sound solid from your research, I'd say grab a 1TB, maybe wait a while, and pick up another, or wait for someone with a better recommendation. I'm definitely interested in the responses you get, because I'm starting to run out of space myself, and am open to trying something else.

Although I have no strong personal feelings to influence your choice, did you read the article on RPS about solid state drives?

I've got an 80gb one (had it for about 18 months), and they seem a lot bigger, cheaper and faster now. No idea about reliability.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/04/04/if-you-buy-one-pc-upgrade-this-year%E2%80%A6/

I'm looking at reviews in NewEgg and it looks like the 1 TB Blue drive has issues of its own... augh. :(

They're neat, but obscenely expensive. I think they'd be great for a boot drive, but I'm mostly looking to use this new hard drive for data storage.