Recommended harddisk brand for HTPC

Ideally, to keep noise, size and power down it should contain none. But if you must, SSDs are great.
 
SSDs would definitely not fit into the capacity category. I'm assuming these are storage drives?
 
What noise? My only noisy drive is a 1TB Hitachi that's made loads of seek noise ever since I upgraded its firmware to correct a cache thrashing problem. I did return a couple of drives because of vibration, both < 1TB Samsungs.

Any green drive should run cool, and it seems that all WD externals made in the past 2 years are greens. Also WD externals are easier to open up than Seagates.
 
WD Red is good for RAID due to TLER. Get a hardware controller and you could do RAID-5.

I personally run 3x WD Blacks in RAID-0 for editing raw video and a WD green for temp storage. Green runs cool. The blacks run hot and you need to keep a fan on them. I have a 120mm low rpm fan across them and they're at 36-39c. Without the fan they were hitting 59-60c. not good. The blacks have a 5 year warranty and the green has a 2 year.

My Plex server is more of a storage sever but without the need for high availability. I'm running a 2TB Seagate barracuda (7,200rpm) along with a 2TB Seagate green (5,900rpm). Both have 2 year warranties and both run cool without a fan. The barracuda is much faster... faster then my blacks (single drive test).

My OS drives are Crucal M4s but I'd go with a Samsung Evo now. Solid like Crucial but better performance. Similar prices.
 
I would get Reds over Greens any day even for single-disk applications. They are technically very similar, omit the useless head-parking "feature", and seem to always have a bit better performance characteristics.
 
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