Google has published a paper on disk drive reliability (Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population, PDF), based on its experience with 100,000 hard drives. The key finding is not much help: "Surprisingly, we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported."
In other words, high temperatures and heavy use do not actually make drives fail sooner (unless the temperature is excessive).
Otherwise, if the SMART monitoring tools find problems with a drive, it is likely to fail. However, SMART is not a good predictor. More than half the drives that did fail were OK with SMART.
Google does not mention brand names, so there's no help in that department. However, Storage Review tracks perfornmance and surveys reliability.
The paper is being discussed at Slashdot.
