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IMHO, I would go with Maxtor, only because I am familiar with them and I have always used them. They are very dependable and I have never had any problems with my drive. I currently have a 120GB Maxtor with 8MB cache, spinning at 7200 RPM. It has and continues to serve me well. :)
Except that I have had exactly the opposite experience to jackson3837 - I have had nothing but trouble with Maxtor but my many IBM/Hitachi drives have never given me a single problem. I've vowed to never buy another Maxtor as long as I live.
That's the problem, everyone has different experiences.
Only experience is with Seagate to date. And this runs very smooth, even the whole switch (I ghosted the boot partition) went smooth.
Overall, speed increased in the range of 10%+ for bootup and file access on my setup.
Only the combination with the IDE RAID is slow. But then, that's only used for Ghost images about once a week.
From experience I found that the old Maxtor Fireballs were problematic and the turn around time on an RMA'ed product was usually about five business days. Western Digital is much faster I find, they get a replacement drive delivered by the end of next business day. WD by and large has had a better track record but I believe Maxtor has greatly improved their quality assurance.
From the last two years I have had to replace a total of 38 drives: WD - 1 Maxtor - 8 Fujitsu - 29. To be fair Fujitsu drives replaced were recalled by the manufacturer and they also replaced the drives within 48 hours.
So what I thought is true, everyone believes in a different drive. Personally I have a seagate in my dell (that's what it came with) and I have not had any problems. I have also built to computers with IBM/Hitachi and have had zero problems. I did install a fujistu drive in a compaq (grrrrrrrrrr) and we did have problems, then it worked, then it died.
I had to vote for Western Digital, I've had Maxtor drives die on me, but also found their tech support was good. I also like WD's tools, easy to use. You can format a drive in a heart beat using WD's formatting tool.