[LAU] Which SATA drive? Size? [Was: Re: partition table]

I was surprised to hear that so many people write their audio files to a second drive. I always thought that most audio people preferred as few drives as possible in a system to keep noise down. On a somewhat related topic, is there a brand of SATA drive that people recommend as far as reliability, speed, and low noise? Also, even though Terabyte drives are inexpensive these days, would a 500 GB drive be better as far as speed (reading/writing) than a 1 TB drive? (I really would not need a full TB anyways). P.S. My current Seagate 76GB SCSI drive just died and rather continue to buy SCSI and buy high priced drives that are smaller compared to the recent SATA drives available, I thought I would buy a SATA for my current system as well as an new system this time.