My last hard drive purchase was Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS 2TB 5900 RPM which was in 2010. Any suggestions on hard drive to purchase these days? Thanks in advance!

I guess it depends on if it is a system drive or pool drive.
My system drive is a wd black which works extremely well with no issues what so ever. other than it is somewhat loud and it gets hotter than the old one and it was higher in cost.
Then there are the new wd red drives I have not tried at all. but several people here have posted about them.
My pool drives are a mix of the segate lp drives and wd green ears and eads.
The segate was plug and play for a pool drive. And I used the jumper on the wd green EARS advanced format one.
The wd black did not need anything as far as a system drive goes.

So bottom line is the system drive is what you need to be careful on since it is a legacy system and the advanced drives must be capable of being re-aligned to work correctly with the two partition's.

But my next replacement drive purchase probably will be either a wd red(first choice) or another seagate lp. Price will determine which one I get.

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I started with the 470, the seagate died 2 years later, I had added hitachi 1 and 2 tb drives for the pool and bought a bunch of them as they were cheap at the time. Replaced the seagate with a 2tb hitachi then a year later the power supply died, replaced that and while I was waiting bought a x510, gave the seagate away that came in that and replaced it with 2tb hitachi.
The hitachi run hot 96-110 but they keep chugging along. Now I am trying the red drives. 1 tb for the system drive and 2tb for the storage drives. The red drives run cooler by about 10-20 but, i had my first sector reallocation event just a few weeks after installing the 2tb. Hope the reds play nice, to soon to tell, I have seen mixed reviews.

I think the main thing, no matter which brand you go with is installing the (SMART addin) so you can keep an eye on them, the server is all about the drives.
http://dojonorthsoftware.net/Downloads.html there is a free one just for the servers.
The 3 top failures with these systems are, I think:
1) Harddrives
2) lan nic dieing
3) power supplies or power bumps
Of course keeping it clean and cool will help the drives out as well.
Good luck

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My preferences for hard drives are as follows:

(1) WD BLK - 7200 RPM 5 yr waranty
(2) Hitachi Deskstar (aka Deathstars) - 7200 RPM 3 yr waranty

I do have other drives which work well but are not on my preferred list:

(1) WD Green - 5400 RPM (EADS and EARS)
(2) Samsung Spinpoint F2 or F3 - 5400 RPM
(3) Hitachi Deskstar - 5400 RPM
(4) Seagate Barracuda (5yr warranty - most now are 1yr warranty) - Use this for E-Mail

Last month I did purchase 5 2tb WD REDs for my WHS2011 Server but I do not have enough run time on them to determine if I should add them to my preferred drive listing or not. (sorry on that one)

The Advanced Format Drives are confusing some are plug and play others are not. Those which are not will require Aligning or installing a jumper depending on how the drive is used. I recommend that you check with the manufacturer to find out what if anything you need to do to prepare the drive for use in a Legacy Operating System.

Like most people I do have my preferences for hard drives and one thing I would say to you is to chose a drive from a manufacturer your comfortable with.

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