what 3tb drives are you looking at? Hitachi seems to be the big one but I don't trust Hitachi. been reading about lots of issues with them already.
I've pretty much moved to using only Western Digital drives.
I don't trust the 3TB drives 100% either, but I plan on having 2 copies of everything on two 3TB drives and then I'll keep my off site backups on a variety of 1 and 2TB drives.
All that will have to wait. I was holding out to 3TB drives getting close to the $100 mark.
At this point, I'm with you as far as trusting 3TB drives. I wouldn't go near a Hibachi DeathStar if you paid me to take the drive. I have one that's been RMA'd twice and still died the third time (drive health is 81% at present with a whack of bad sectors and runs REALLY hot... in fact, I could use it as a Hibachi - I'm not making this up).
As far as WD drives go... well, I've had two WD20EADS drives go back for RMA's out of 5 that I use in my setup. I find they run relatively warm (about 34-38c) under moderate useage. I have 1 Seagate LP drive which runs around 32c and then I have the two Samsung HD204UI's which run between 29c and 32c under moderate useage. I had been hoping to pick up (6) of those drives and replace the rest in my storage boxes but I'm not interested in paying $120 a pop at the moment.
The sad part is that Seagate recently purchased Samsung's Hard Drive division so, I'm guessing, we'll be seeing these drives phased out (which is really unfortunate). They run the coolest, quiest and have offered me the least number of headaches.