I made some money so it's time to get a new hard drive. I'm looking for suggestions - as long as it's 2 TB, cheap, and not prone to failure.

The drive I'm replacing is an older ST3500320AS Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drive. I've been getting some warnings from smartmontools for a while and it's time to replace it. The problem is that this is my boot drive, so uh, I'm not sure what to go with.

Any suggestions? As long as it's available from a US retailer, I can buy it.

I bought one a while ago (only 1 TB though), it was a Western Digital.
Works great and it was highly recommended by the sales guy (I go to see this guy very often and he knows what he's talking about).

edit: it was a 1TB 7200 RPM. I'd give you the exact model number but I'm away from home for a month. Sorry, I'll take back what I said, this man's right. Hitachi is wank.
I have two WD HDDs and one Hitachi, got the names mixed up.

Western Digital. 5 year warranty and the 2TB Black will give a Raptor a run for it's money in transfer speed. It's not the cheapest by a long shot but it's worth the investment. If you can't stretch to a WD then go for a Samsung, I've been using two 1TB drives for 4 years now with no issues. Avoid Hitachi.

I generally stick with Seagate and Western Digital for hard drives. They have the best track record for reliability and last I checked that was still backed up by an extended guarantee. Just don't go too cheap though.

Samsungs spinpoint F3 are probably the best hdd out there for normal price. but only 1T.

which is not a bad thing. half of the price of 2T but less chance of a loss of all data.

I might be having some epic amount of good luck but I never, ever lost a drive due to failure of any kind. And most were just some HD I got with the bought PC, probably the cheapest one they could find. So by my experience, this condition extends to "every damn HD you find". So, not much help from me, sadly.

My very first hard drive - an 8 GB drive - crashed and burned on me about four years after getting it. By then, the drive was being used to hold some nonessential data. I didn't really use it much by then and didn't really care about it when it died. And then there's the old 500 GB drive I gave to an old friend - who then yelled at me 'cause it died a week later. >_>

My main concern is buying a hard drive and having it die out on me a month or two after buying it. I've read that a lot of newer drives tend to die out after a very short period of time, so it worries me. One or two years isn't bad for a modern drive, in my opinion.

I'm not too fond of Western Digital. Their Caviar Blacks are way too pricey, and I've heard very bad things about their Green and Blue drives. The Samsung Spinpoint F3 1 TB drive seems pretty good, but the 1.5 TB variant costs the same, so I dunno.

Look at mine in the thread I just umped of mine. A 2TB high rated drive for 80 plus tax/shipping.

Western Digital are phasing out the Blue series as it serves no function anymore. Really there is only Green and Black. Green is fine as a storage drive for movies, music and other backups but lousy for a C: drive or for use with games and HDD intensive programs like Power Director. The Black series would be your only real choice for a replacement boot drive. Given you can't stretch to one then I would say go with the Samsung, I've uses two for years now and they have been perfectly reliable.

^This^

Samsung Spinpoint F3, WD Caviar Black, WD RE3
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Everything else
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"Green" (5400-5900 rpm) drives

Green drives are fine from Samsung.....for data storage/movies/etc. It's the WD greens thta have a lousy rep.

Oh, there's nothing actually wrong with them, they're just slow. The disk drive is already the slowest part of your computer. A 5400 rpm drive just makes things worse.

As I said if it's not used for booting and just for dos games and movies/etc it can be fine. I plan on getting a Samsung Green soon so I can transfer all my pics/movies/music to it and free more room on the primary drives for games/etc.

OP specifically said he wanted it for a boot drive. Although your justification is fine as far as it goes, it doesn't address the OP's requirement. The boot drive should be as fast as possible without overspending. Large-cache 7200 rpm drives are the most desirable.