What's the current thinking on a good HDD for streaming samples and/or projects?

SSD - 
 
Once you go solid state for streaming samples, you'll never go back!!
Still a bit more expensive than conventional HD, but I think most folks who have switched would agree it's worth the cost.
 
Black Friday deals have the Samsung 850 EVO 1TB on sale for $250...
 
If you need to stick with HDD, prices are coming way down on most name-brand higher capacity HDD.
I've seen pretty good offerings from Seagate, Samsung and WD.
Look for something other then economy-line drives, and spinning at 7200 RPM.

Im actually replacing and upgrading a failed HDD so not looking to go SSD.
The HDD was fine for streaming the samples and projects it contained.

So my question still stands thanks.

Most 7200 rpm drives will probably provide pretty similar performance. There are actually not that many manufacturer's. Generally you should avoid "specialty" drives and find one that is sold as a desktop drive. AV drives are designed for surveillance cameras where not every byte is important. NAS, enterprise drives etc. are designed to be used in fault tolerant server arrays where a weak signal will result in a failed read and stop trying early in the process on the assumption that the data can be picked up from a mirrored drive or a parity drive, while a desktop drive, designed for single drive use, will retry the read several times in order to get the data. The "black" drives are designed with double caches and often higher rpm to provide somewhat faster transfers. Obviously a green drive, which senses low demand and slows down to save power is not a good choice for audio. A few years ago the 3TB drives were notoriously prone to failure, but this is probably not true with the newer offerings in that size. 

Thanks. I appreciate the details. I was hoping for a particular brand and model number.

This :-
WD Black 3TB Performance Desktop Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD3003FZEX

Thanks, I'll check it out.

I actually run with multiple hard drives in my primary computer, and deliberately chose 2 TB 7,200 drives rather than 3 TB ones.
 
I did this because I would rather split my sample libraries over 2-3 drives than have them all on one drive.  This is because splitting them to separate devices increases the parallel streaming capability which will potentially greatly improve load times for samples when the samples are from different instruments/libraries.
 
It IS still dependent on which libraries are most frequently accessed, using the above approach, but even though I still end up pulling a lot of samples from one drive or the other, I DO see a general performance improvement overall, from splitting across multiple drives.
 
I have nearly 3 TB of samples, and currently have them split across 3 different 2 TB 7,200 drives.
 
Bob Bone
 

On a strong recommendation I've gone with a couple of Toshiba P300 drives. 1 x 1TB + 1 x 2TB.

Thanks for the recommendations.

Nice.
 
I think you should be happy with the performance and the quality of those drives.  I have a couple of them and like them a bunch, plus I believe they have a 3 year warranty.
 
Bob Bone