Which 1TB (or bigger) SATA drive is the coolest/quietest/least power-hungry

Question

I have a Power Mac G4 Dual 1.25 GHz MDD (it's this model here) which (as it's unmodified) runs very hot & noisy much of the time.
What doesn't help is that I have 3 hard drives installed. 2 of these (including the boot drive) are IDE (80 GB & 120 GB), and are attached to the cables at the front of the machine (am I right in thinking that this is the ATA-66 bus?). The third is a SATA drive (250 GB) connected to one of the sets of cables at the back of the machine (the ATA-100 bus?) via an IDE -> SATA adapter (not a PCI card).
This adapter took me many weeks of research to track down (& order online from the USA) as there didn't appear to be (at the time - a few years ago) anyone here in the UK that made or sold these adapters. (The opposite adapter - IDE drive to SATA cable - was freely available ironically, even in my local electronics shop). The physical size of the adapter means that I can't sit one of the other drives in the empty drive bay at the back of the machine.
A few months ago, as I was almost out of hard drive space, I decided to get a new (SATA) drive to replace the existing 3 drives. As well as giving me lots of capacity, one drive is going to use less power than 3, give off much less heat than 3, and hopefully reduce the fan noise.
Incidentally, I've found many good articles on reducing heat/power consumption/noise in MDD Macs - see here, here, here, here & here.
At the time, 1TB was the largest size available. After much research, along with some forum postings - see here & here - I decided to go for the Samsung Spinpoint F1 drive, which is currently quite cheap - see here.
However, I recently discovered that Seagate now makes a 1.5 TB drive, which would obviously be preferable - see here & here although it is much more expensive - see here.
However, there are many reports of problems with the Seagate drive - see here, here & here.
What I'm wondering is if there are any drives that are bigger than 1TB apart from the Seagate?
If not, would people recommend that I chance going for the Seagate, and hope that I don't have the problems, or that I'll be able to flash the firmware at some future point to sort the problem if it occurs (I have Virtual PC 7.0.2 installed, running Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 - would this enable internal hard drives to have their firmware updated?) or should I just play safe and go for the Samsung, even though it's "only" 1TB?
The largest capacity money can buy is my primary concern, followed by low power usage, low heat output & low noise.
Many thanks.

Answer 1

Thanks for the info.
I don't really see the point in the expense of a PCI card when the IDE -> SATA adaptor works fine, and if I bought a PCI card, I'd then feel obliged to go through the hassle of selling the adaptor on eBay to try to recoup part of the cost of the PCI card.
I should have mentioned before that I want to format my new drive as a single partition, in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format, and to boot from it. I only want the new drive in the Mac - I don't want any other drives in there. Apart from increased capacity & performance, and reduced power consumption, heat & noise - the main point of getting the new drive is so that there is only one drive in my Mac. Having more than one is a complete pain for me.
At the moment, despite having "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" unchecked in the Energy Saver pane of System Preferences, all 3 drives spin down very soon after they stop being accessed, which means an infuriating delay (& spinning beach ball) when they spin up again. One or more of them spinning up even interrupts music playing sometimes, and when I go to shut down the computer, if they are spun down but mounted on the desktop, they spin up again before they spin down as part of the shutdown procedure! Also, with more than one drive, I can't tell which drive a file/folder is on just by looking at it, if it's on the desktop.
As far as Other World Computing goes, they may ship to the UK, but by the time the international shipping charges are added, I very much doubt if the total cost of a new drive would work out cheaper than ordering from a UK supplier & getting free shipping.
Another potential problem I've discovered with the Seagate drive is actually a quote from the Other World Computing website that's reproduced in comment number 66 (on page 3) of the MacRumors Forums thread that I gave the link to in my initial post. Basically it says that if you format the Seagate drive as a single partition on a Mac, the performance isn't acceptable. It's apparently fine though if it's partitioned in 2 equal size volumes, or if you format it as an NTFS or FAT32 drive. Neither of these work-arounds are any use to me though.
Everything so far suggests that I should just go for the Samsung 1 TB drive, but I'm hesitant to do so until it's confirmed to me that there aren't any other drives out there that are bigger than 1 TB apart from the Seagate, and also, knowing my luck, the day after I buy the Samsung, Western Digital or Hitachi or someone will bring out a flawless 1.5 TB drive for not a lot more money, and I'll be kicking myself for ending up with only 2 thirds of the capacity than I could have had...