Having had to work on Macs (servers, desktops, workstations, and laptops), they're a bit spotty on quality these days. Their "elegant" hardware design is a nightmare to work on.
I'd go homebrew all the way.
As for the HD, I've got a WD Caviar that was cheap and huge and worked fine for about 2 years. Now it's a paperweight that is holding my data hostage. Can't install an OS over it and using it as a slave in a different machine ends up in a "can't boot OS" error. Next time is seagate all the way; ya get what ya pay for.
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