Advice needed on hard disk purchase

[Federico Voges]

Hi,

I'm planning on replacing my old RAID5 array on my linux server with a 
couple of 1TB mirrored SATA disks.

As I have no idea which brands/models are currently considered good, I'd 
like to hear your opinions.

I'm specially interested in which brands/models I should really stay 
away from.

I'm not looking for anything fancy. It's for my home server so fast disk 
with big memory buffers and low seek times, even though nice, don't have 
priority unless they are "cheap". I'm looking for something balanced 
that will give good performance without having to ask for a loan to buy 
them.

Checking what's available now in the market here (UK), I see Samsung, 
Hitachi, Western Digital, Seagate and Maxtor.

Cheers,
Fed.