It was a Western Digital 500 GB Green Power Internal Desktop Hard Drive. The new one I got is the exact same, but it's 1 TB.
wasnt that a caviar blue in the link? anyway, caviar green isnt meant for anything more than plain storage, like external drives and stuff i think. i have a caviar green 1tb (which i bought before checking online to see the hell people go through with these drives - i was lucky, no problems yet) and i have it in an external case. i just plug it in, backup and shut it off. my dad gave me a caviar blue 1tb he wasnt using for storage - i put that in a case as well. but i'm crossing my fingers. thing is, if you look at forums and people's experience with drives from major manufacturers, like WD, Seagate and Hitachi, you'll find out lots of people have had a drive fail from one of these, sometimes one of each and often two drives in a row (like one bought and its replacement) even in models that are supposed to be reliable and stuff. in other words, i'm not surprised it failed and i wouldnt say its your fault either - its classic shitty reliability that these corporations seem to be just fine with, regardless of the fact that many people are doing raid-2 and raid-5 on these, just because they dont trust drives anymore.
edit - btw, just a note but that drive in the link... overpriced IMO. that should be the cost of the 1tb not 500gb fucking thieves... and it says, "works with windows vista"... thanks best buy, so useful since people either run xp cause vista sucks, or 7 cause vista sucks scrotum cheese or something non-windows cause they cant stand windows anymore...