What's the favorite 2TB drive these days?

Wondering what the preference is on brand for 2TB drives these days, both for consumer drives and enterprise SATA drives. I'm looking to get 2-4 to put in a QNaP NAS and I'm undecuded on if I buy 2 enterprise grade ones for now and add 2 later, or just get 4 consumer ones and go without CCTL/TLER/ERC.

Get the Hitachi's (consumer drive). Many posters on this board are reporting excellent results and stability even with high performance Raid controllers. The lack of TLER (or equiv) does not seem to be a problem. My array under an Areca 1680ix has been rock solid stable using them for many months.

That's good to hear. What is noise and heat like on the Hitachi 2Tb drives? I've come across some comments that seem to indicate they run very hot compared to other drives, but the posts where not in contenext of which "other drives" (ie. other 2TB drives). The Hitachi's are 7200 compared to most of the other popular 2Tb options being 5400, so that would make them run hotter in general.

I've not noticed any issues with head/noise. They consistantly run cooler than the 7200.11s that they replaced (30-33c) but i have them in a case with excellent airflow. Any drive would probably be OK for me. Noise is subjective - yes, you can hear them, but they are not chattery/offensive like the older Maxtor's. The most obvious noise I hear is when the array has been idle for a while and the controller sequentially spins them up. Personally, I find that particular noise reassuring .

WDC green for operations that do not need to be as fast as possible like my HTPC. WDC black and a SSD for ones that do. At work I am putting WDC black drives in all desktops now and all linux software raid 5/6 arrays.

Work:
16 WD 2tb RE4-GP drives - one DOA, otherwise they're working well with Adaptec and LSI controllers
32 Hitachi 7K2000 drives - working great on two 16 port Areca SATA controllers

Home:
8 WD20EADS drives - all TLER enabled, one dead after a month. Another drive has timeout issues with my Areca 1680ix-12.
8 Seagate 2tb LP drives - working great in Linux software RAID 6 using both onboard SATA and a pair of Marvell PCIe x1 SATA III cards. I'm using smartctl scterc to enable TLER/ERC.

I have no idea about heat/noise. All drives are installed in server style hardware with noisy redundant PSUs. All temps sit in the neighborhood of 30c +/- 3.

Samsung 2TB. I have 20 of these and never experienced any problem

The only problem I have with the F3 series Samsung drives is that they seem to ignore the staggered spin-up setting on my backplane which all of my 1TB samsung drives honoured.

Ended up with the Hitachi drives. The fact that I could get them overnighted so I have them for this weekend had a big part in the decision. I also liked that I saw more folk using them in hardware and software RAID setups.

Same for me as I have turned into a fan of them for my WHS.

Earlier this year I bought a pair of Hitachi 2TB drives for my WHS system (adding to the 2 500gb Seagate drives it came with). So far so good - no issues. I'm duly impressed, especially for the price I got them for.

For my main system, however, I'm going through a similar decision trying to find the best drives to run in RAID 0 or RAID 5, and currently I'm leaning towards the WD RE4 series, or the Seagate Constellation ES. Probably the Seagate since they're somewhat less expensive (I need 3 or 4 of them) and I've had extremely good success with Seagate drives over the last 6 years (the system I'm running now has had 4 500GB Barracuda ES drives running in RAID0 for over 3.5 years, and another system with 4 400GB Barracuda ES drives for nearly 5 years).

Someone pointed out that the error rating on the RE4 was the same as the Black consumer line. I didn't investigate it for myself. But only the enterprise drives would have CCTL/TLER/ERC permanently enabled if you are concerned with that. You can enable CCTL/TLER/ERC on just about every drive manually with hdat2 or smartctl. It will survive a reboot, but not a full power cycle of the drive.

If you are running software raid, CCTL/TLER/ERC may not matter. I still see mixed information as to if it's relevant for software raid. It's relevant for hardware raid controllers though.

Seagate has taken a bath in their reliability lately (past 12-18 months). It was enough to shy me away from them, even though my 750g Barracuda 7200.10's on my Adaptec 5405 have been completely trouble free with 2 years of 24x7x365 runtime and some heavy use (video editing, lots of NZB par/unrar jobs, etc). This mostly pertains to consumer drives though, as you don't find nearly as much in terms of comments on enterprise drives.