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Right I am looking at a Hard drive for a HTPC. 2TB drives seemed to be the best £/gb performer so i was looking at those. Then I spotted this. The MTBF is 1 million hours ... even if it lasts a 10th of that it would make me more than happy. I am really most interested in silence and reliability which WD claims are the 2 strong points of that drive.
So should I go for the biggest/cheapest/biggest cache. Or go for one of those WD AV-GP jobbies!?
Personally, I don't see the point. Make sure you get a green, low-power or whatever they want to call it drive. They typically run at around 5400-5900rpm, compared to a standard disk that runs at 7200rpm.
The noise comes from the rotation, so the slower they spin the better they'll be. Are the AV-GP drives better than the Caviar Greens for noise? Perhaps, but I doubt the difference is really appreciable.
As for reliability, I believe Google just use bog-standard desktop hard drives, so you make what you will of that. Just make sure its backed up, all hard drives can be unreliable.
If you are thinking of a 2tb drive, then my recommendation would be a Samsung HD204UI F4EG, and if you find it too noisy (which I don't think you will), a silent enclosure to go with it.
That said, I've put all my stuff on a central machine and will more than likely switch out the HTPC hard drive for an SSD shortly. Doesn't need to be big - 30-40gb would be fine, as it'll only ever store the OS. Everything else is stored remotely. No noise issues that way :)