It's absolutely absurd how many people still rant about the "Deathstar" and say Hitachi sucks. How long does it take for you to shut up about one bad model? By the same logic I could rant about how WD is terrible because they had tons of 1.6G drives that died.
I never got any Deathstars, and I always found IBM to be extremely reliable in IDE and SCSI drives before they were bought by Hitachi. Now, though, I wouldn't get a Hitachi simply because their RMA policy sucks. If you call them up and say your drive has bad sectors, they'll refuse to RMA it. They'll tell you to download their utility to low-level the drive and mark the sectors bad so that it will format, and then the utility will say there is absolutely nothing wrong with the drive. Their diagnostic program can even throw out an error that says the drive was damaged by shock, then they will also refuse to RMA the drive. If you actually do get them to RMA a drive, they will refuse to cross-ship. They will wait until they recieve the drive then sit on it for up to 14 days before they send it back. This is their policy.
I know Hitachi drives are fast, but I don't think I'm ever buying another one. Maxtor has also changed their RMA policy every couple years. For awhile they had a "no hassle" policy where they would just basically say, "Is it broken? Then we'll cross-ship you a new one." Now they're back to a much more obnoxious policy.
I will only buy Seagate, WD and Samsung. Seagate drives use more power than Hitachi, and they're not incredibly fast, but they don't try to screw you when a drive dies (and it's not very often that one dies).