I've tried a variety over the years, and have found some minor problems with Seagate, but the worst was the infamous Fujitsu HD failure of their MPG series drives:
http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/fujitsu-...k-recovery.htm
There was some major fall-out over this
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/09...itsu_hdds_all/ and I would like to think that Fujitsu have made sure that won't happen to them again.
Having said that, all they offered was a replacement drive, no chance of getting the data recovered - even though it would have been simple for them to do. And trying to get it done commercially was obviously not economical for home users.
Some other info on other drives:
http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/hard-disk-failures.htm
My most recent problem was with a Seagate drive - partition info getting corrupted etc. I don't know if this was due to the drive or not, but it's not going back into any of my computers!
Now got a WD drive in it's place - a little noisier on seek, but only time will tell if it's a good drive.
Meanwhile, no matter how good your drive, make sure you back up the stuff you think you can't live without, cos recovery can be costly. In my case with the Seagate it cost about 60 quid for some software that managed to unravel the disk's logical structure. I got everything back (as far as I can tell) but would rather not have to go through all of that again.