kitekrazy1
Maxtor is Seagate.

I used be involved with Disk Drive Design (Power Electronics I.C.s). After drive companies merged (i.e. Digital Equipment Corporation [DEC], Quantum, Maxtor, Seagate), they referred to the company they worked for as "Digiquackstorgate".
Walt
 

Hard-drive reliability is subjective to the company and how it operates--and this changes year after year. Like Anti-Virus companies, one drive manufacturer will produce the best of the year, while another will take its place the next year and so on. the good news is, many of them are excellent for the price. I always advise just making sure you have good backups: three drives (two onsite, and one off-site, which is carefully updated every week).

I use all WD Black drives now and have had nothing but good experiences with them. The other major benefit to Black drives (and I think a couple of their other drives) is that they have a 5 year warranty. If the drive fails, they take care of it. I've had one of their Green drives fail before and it was replaced without issue.

TerraSin
I use all WD Black drives now and have had nothing but good experiences with them. The other major benefit to Black drives (and I think a couple of their other drives) is that they have a 5 year warranty. If the drive fails, they take care of it. I've had one of their Green drives fail before and it was replaced without issue.

 The drives I've RMA'd were WD Blacks.  Never had to do that with a WB Blue.  Those old IDE drives almost last forever.  I had a WD 160GB that I put in a enclosure that ran 24 hours and it died last year. I may have bought that at the turn of the century.   I was at an estate sale last Summer and I think the person was a part retailer. I got a WD 500GB IDE for $10.  I popped it in a machine for additional storage.  You can still buy those.

thomasabarnes
I have 2 x 1TB Seagate drives, replaced one after less than a year having it. Got the replacement,  and it went out completely. Now, the other one which I had about 4 years, is going out. It just disapears in Windows, and I have to restart the PC to get it back to show. 
 
I'm gonna need two more storage drives 1TB each. This time I'm going with Western Digital. I have a 300GB WD HDD that I've had more than 4 years, and it's still working great! I know the problems are usually with bigger HDDs like 1TB and bigger. I don't think I'm ever gonna go with a HDD over 1TB in size.
 
 

 You should have SMART enabled in the BIOS and install WD Diagnostics and Sea Tools.  Run SMART tests. Usually the software apps will detect failure before your BIOS tells you.  I had a drive disappear and I found out the SATA cable wasn't secured.  
 I avoid internal drives over 2gb because they have more platters. 
 
 
 

kitekrazy1The drives I've RMA'd were WD Blacks.  Never had to do that with a WB Blue.  Those old IDE drives almost last forever.  I had a WD 160GB that I put in a enclosure that ran 24 hours and it died last year. I may have bought that at the turn of the century.   I was at an estate sale last Summer and I think the person was a part retailer. I got a WD 500GB IDE for $10.  I popped it in a machine for additional storage.  You can still buy those.

I think you'll find people who have issues with any drive. I've personally never had to RMA a Black (knock on wood) but I know I'm covered for 5 years if I ever do. Plus, Blacks are high performance drives which are good for large libraries if you're not going with SSD.