I dunno who’s most reliable, and most of my Googling says that brand name doesn’t really matter for drive reliability. Actually, a bunch of Western Digital drives were coming out on top.

Perhaps you should buy a Hitachi hard drive, if only because they made that Get Perpendicular animation, and we need to encourage our tech companies to make more animations like it. 🙂

As for RAM testing, there’s software out there that’ll stress test the RAM, but I don’t know any off the top of my head. I’d be Googling it. Google is an extension of my brain.