What Hard Disc Drive models with the new SATA3 standard (nominal rates of 6 GB/sec) from WD, Samsung, or other manufacturers have demonstrated optimum reliability and top level performance?

What HDD that claim the fast 6 GB/sec speed are known to have caused problems?

Oh, noes...Its pretty hard to test long term reliability for HDDs, and every time I've seen the subject come up you'll have people say that 'X' manufacturer makes crap drives, 'Y' makes OK drives, and 'Z' makes great drives...then you'll have people totally disagree.

Some of the WD 'green' power drives are notorious for problems. A lot of that is due to user error (512B/4k sector problems). AFAIK its just the WD green power drives have got the most coverage, mainly because they were the 1st of the 512B/4k drives released to market, the other manufacturers have also had some problems.

WD caviar 'black' drives are IMO the best of the current SATAIII (6GBit/sec) mechanical drives.

Not that mechanical HDDs need SATAIII, they still havent saturated the bandwidth of SATAII (3GBit/sec). The only things that really 'need' SATAIII are the fastest of the SSDs.