I second the JVC and Panasonic remarks, I have a PV-VS4820 which is what Video Monitoring Services used for their master decks in many of their locations. I worked at one for 2 or 3 years and of the 100 or so decks we had, 3/4ths were these, couple of AG-1970s and JVC decks. We ran our master decks 12 hrs a day, 365 a year with in-house maintenance. The monitoring decks were almost universally 4820s which had to deal with multiple FF/RW while someone listened to a sentence, rewound, listened again (transcription). These were used about the same amount of time/day and in my 3 years there, I saw very very few replaced.
If you can find one that hasn't been abused already, the deck will outlast you. I'm biased, but if I had three choices:
AG-1970
PV-VS4820
JVC (insert general SVHS model, I've never seen a bad one).
I used to have a source for buying the tapes at relatively decent prices, if you need help let me know and I'll dig it up.
Also, get good SVideo cables, I'll never go back to RCAs for video.