Seagate has a long tradition with 3.5" drives, good performers at an affordable price. The Barracuda 7200.9 series is an interesting line with SATA2 and NCQ technologies, aiming for the highest performance and reliability. Seagate offers a generous 5 year warranty, which should please most users.

Compared with our older WD 800JD SATA drive, we saw a big performance increase with higher throughput (up to 75MB/sec), although unfortunately, the Seagate's seek times were also higher (17ms vs 13ms). Operating temperature was at around 33°C during idle. The price range in the 80GB category is around €45~55, with small differences between the various models. At that price, you could buy not one, but two Seagate ST380811AS and use them in a Raid 0,1 setup to create a reliable, high performance desktop computer.