I've purchased many brands of hard drives from Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, and IBM. The only drive I ever had die on me was the old IBM.
In my primary rig now I have a Western Digital Caviar SE16 (320GB, 7200RPM) that I paid $99 for at newegg.com last year and it's been flawless and quiet. It's now only $75.
Newegg.com
That being said, in my 2nd PC which also serves as my personal file server and FTP server, I have 2 - 250GB 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda Hard Drives with 8mb Cache setup in raid for the last couple years and they are very quiet and work flawlessly as well.