If you are looking at SATA drives, I like Western Digital Caviar drives and put them in ICY DOCK Firewire enclosures. These WD drives are very quiet because they have variable rotational speed. The drive should be more than sufficient for an audio bitrate. The ICY DOCK enclosures seem to be very good and you can get Firewire 800 and USB2 and eSATA.
I recommend several full low level format of any new drive. This will cause every block on the drive to be read and written, sparing out any bad blocks. Also helps as a "burn-in" process, to make sure your drive does not die on you when you reach a certain spot on the drive. Anything you can do that will cause repeated reads and writes to the entire drive over an extended period of time (a few days to a month), will tend to weed out bad drives.
Western Digital Caviar Link.
I recommend several full low level format of any new drive. This will cause every block on the drive to be read and written, sparing out any bad blocks. Also helps as a "burn-in" process, to make sure your drive does not die on you when you reach a certain spot on the drive. Anything you can do that will cause repeated reads and writes to the entire drive over an extended period of time (a few days to a month), will tend to weed out bad drives.
Western Digital Caviar Link.