Never had a problem w/ Seagate (knock on wood!).
 

This post always flies by when I don't have time to write, but I would not get too caught up in "brand" over "form/fit/function" when choosing drives.
 
The reality of things is that a lot of the components in drives are common (i.e., from vendors; such as media, gimbal arms, flex-on-suspensions, etc.), so a lot of the "brand" boils down to the heads. I have yet to have a HDD fail on me, and actually have a ST3000DM001 as the data drive in the Win7 machine I just replaced (in service from 7/2011-2/2018, but the entire machine is still fully functional). I was always waiting for that particular drive to be my first kill, but I never killed it.
 
As much will go into how a drive is used as to what brand it is; although, in general, mobile drives are designed to higher heat and shock specs than desktop drives. Heads can see intense heat with constant writes (regardless of brand - the spec "used" to be over 250C!), so massive write operations will put any HDD to its most critical test. Operations like copying an entire drive when only 4 data files have changed on it are only going to decrease the useful life of the heads on the target drive (why using something like xcopy to backup data files is not only quicker, but less stress to the drive (heads)).
 
Quick edit - There is a Wikipedia article on the ST3000DM001, and one comment in that (line above the Class Action section) stands out... "the ST3000DM001 was the only drive without a rotational vibration sensor that counteracts excessive vibration in heavy-usage cases." This makes sense with my experience as well, since the "how" for me never fell into a "heavy-usage case" with the exception of the monthly C: drive images that I did to it. Also (probably more important point), my drive was build prior to the Thailand flood, and it could easily be that the ones affected were "rushed to market" to exploit the drive shortage after the flood occurred.

Bottom line is that all drives can, and will, fail eventually.  The only way to be prepared for that eventuality is with a reasonable backup and restore plan.  Backups/disk images are relatively easy these days, and cost depends on how much data you need to back up.

It's a longstanding principle that all drives fail, that you must treat them as temporary storage and employ redundancy to guard against inevitable data loss.
 
At least, that's been my guiding principle since I bought my first hard drive in 1985. That was based on what, at that time, was 5 years of previous experience (through my day job) with other peoples' drives. Mostly organizations such as insurance companies, banks and government agencies who could actually afford disk drives but really hated to lose them. My job included repairing disk drives (yes, we actually took them apart and put them back together in those days), so I got to see a lot of failed drives (and the consequent hand-wringing, freakouts, firings and demotions). That experience made me cautious.
 
However, the truth is I have personally had very few actual failures in all those years: one dead drive out of 50 or so. None in the last 20 years.
 
Partly, that's due to improved reliability. But mostly it's due to obsolescence predating lifespan. I think I've bought between one and four new drives in nearly every one of those intervening years. None had to survive more than 2 years. Of course, as many of you know, my downfall wasn't the result of drive failure, but robbery. Didn't plan for that!
 
Every drive manufacturer has gone through periods of poor quality. There was a time when nobody wanted to touch Western Digital. Nowadays, it's all I use. Seagate stands out, though, as having had multiple such periods. Bob's link is sobering:
 

 

 I've had to RMA WD Black drives twice, never a WD Blue.   I had a Seagate 500Gb finally go bad and that was a drive at least 10 years old.
 
 I have no idea what Seagates RMA service is but WD sends you a drive and you send the other one back.  I wish a lot of hardware companies did this.