It's really hard to ask a community like this which HDD brand they like. We've had a few discussions on this before, and each one had somebody posting something along the lines of:

"I've used ten hard drives from [company name], and they all failed on me, so I never buy from that company again."

I started out with Western Digital and I like them. I messed up one drive myself and found their warranty return process to be excellent. I now have two Western Digital drives in my machine, and two Seagates. All of them are SATA drives, and they all work fine so far (knocking my desk).

When it comes down to it, I don't worry about this stuff too much. Yes, it would supremely suck if I lost my drives, and I had to lose all my movies and music, but in the end it's just data and it's really just for fun for me. As long as I've backed up my important files (documents, pictures/photos, web site work, Quicken data, emails, etc), then I don't lose any sleep over it.

So get whatever drive you want. Go for the good performers with the big capacities. I picked the Seagates because I wanted quiet drives. They're very quiet (although they seem to have a veeery high-pitched whine to them, but I usually don't notice that).

Good luck to you! I love adding hard disk space!