The chaps over at HotHardware have posted a definitive 2TB HD Roundup: WD, Seagate, Samsung. In this roundup they take a look at a total of nine 3.5-inch, SATA, 2TB hard drives, from Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital. Here's a taster:

The less-expensive drives tends be better values--in part because the performance difference between the drives is smaller than the price difference between them. Of all nine 2TB drives, the Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB offers the best overall value. This, of course, means that the Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB is also the best value of the general-purpose drives as well. For the 2TB performance-class drives, the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB has the best value. You'll notice, however, that the WD Caviar Black 1TB has the best overall value of all the drives tested--so you can potentially get a greater bang-for-the-buck by using two WD Caviar Black 1TB drives than you might with a single 2TB drive. For the enterprise drives, the WD RE4 2TB offers the best value; but the two other enterprise drives are close behind it.

Ultimately, our picks for each class of drive are as follows. For general-purpose drives, you'd think it would be a no-brainer and we'd pick the Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB for its relative high performance and great value. The problem is, it has a much lower load/unload rating of 50,000 cycles, versus 300,000 cycles for the other general-purpose drives--the Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB uses the older Contact Start-Stop (CSS) technology to park its heads, while the other drives use the more updated and more reliable Ramp Loading technology. Once we took the Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB out of the running, it was a very close call between the Samsung EcoGreen F3 2TB and WD Caviar Green 2TB, but we ultimately chose the Samsung EcoGreen F3 2TB because of its speedier overall performance. For the performance drives it was a much tougher call; but with almost identical overall performance, the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB edged out the WD Caviar Black 2TB, due to the Barracuda XT's lower price tag and lower power consumption (see the specs tables on page three of this roundup). For the enterprise-class drives, it's a runaway, with the WD RE4 2TB as the undisputed performance leader that also has high reliability ratings.