I have a Hitachi, about 2 years old now, only a 250Gb, but it is still going fine.

I am going to get a nice 1TB at some point and will get another Hitachi, I also got some old Weston digital that are coming up to 5 years old and they are fine as well. the only drives I seem to have problems with is seagate for some reason.

F1's do seem to have issues F2 and F3 seem robust so far, just put an F3 in my Freesat PVR and it's made things much nippier

or that there are less out there in the first place compared to the bigger more well known drives?

I think a lot of people steer clear of Hitachi over the whole Deathstar thing when they were IBM drives....

I'm hoping my F3 doesn't take after its older siblings, but atleast I'm now down to 2 1TB F1s.

I have 2 Samsung Spinpoint F1 500gb drives - no problems with them at all. I like them so much I upgraded my son's PC with 1 as well.