What's more important than the brand is to make sure that the disk is properly cooled. Todays 7200 rpm big disks need extra cooling if you want them to last. There is a reason why professional servers always have high powered separate fans for cooling the disks.
At the moment IBM is probably your best bet if you are looking for stability.
I've used all SCSI drives for 4 years now including a CD-RW and a DVD-Ram. I switched from IDE looking for performance
I haven?t been sorry. When I switched, drives were twice the costs of IDE. Now prices are far more reasonable. I use Seagate and WD. Get yourself a good controller, I use a 2940U2 read a little about cables and jumpers and you?ll be ok.
You can add a SCSI drive to your present system. With most BIOS?s you?ll boot to an IDE C: so be sure to migrate your OS to the new drive. Just Drive Image C: to D: make a change to your boot.ini and you?ll be good to go.
Best thing to do would be too look on Google for some reviews. I have read recently that IBM drives have a high enough failure ratio that a class action lawsuit is in progress. If it doesn't fail in the first few months though, they should be ok for the full lifespan.
SCSI is faster and less CPU hungry than IDE/ATA, but still much more expensive.
The class action suit against IBM is regarding the 75 GB version of Deskstar 75GXP (DTLA-307075). It seems that the customers have used this drive without extra cooling, which will wear down the drive very fast. I guess IBM is at least partly to blame, since they didn't inform the customers properly about how to handle the thermal conditions.
The Deskstar 75GXP was redesigned, named 60 GXP and the maximum capacity reduced to 60 GB. (Smaller size means less heat.)
The 60GXP have very recently been redesigned, named 120GXP and the maximum capacity raised to 120 GB.