I have experienced drives from every manufacturer on the current market and some that are no more.
As a computer engineer, I see many drives of many manufacturers in many machines of many OEM's and small manufacturers.
I have personally experienced NO problems ever with Seagate or Samsung drives. I currently have 3 Seagates and one Samsung. One Seagate is 24 hours old, so its reliability is irrelevant, the Samsung is 6 months old, the other 2 Seagates are 18 months approx and 2 years approx, and are still working perfectly.
I have only seen 4 Seagate drives that are defective (apart from U-series drives which are every bit as bad as other manufacturers parts), one was a heavily used Cuda IV (I replaced it for the customer as it had bad sectors, you only get more). One was DOA (7200.7, without the manufacturers original label), one was an 18 month old 250GB 7200.8 PATA with bad sectors (it was in a USB caddy and has visited many countries on its way from China, and went home on sunday). And the last one was an 18 month old 7200.7 identical in every way to mine, but alas it was in a Shitebox HP with a 12 month warranty.
I have used/sold a LOT more Seagate drives than "Excelstor" (Hitachi derivative, identical drives), or "Maxtor" which I used to use.
My experiences with both of these manufacturers started off well and became a mess. I became concerned with Maxtor, when we bought 5 drives, sold one, the second one made clicking noises (my ears say BAD), the second and third drives did the same, I didnt open the 5th one. They all got returned, and were replaced with Hitachi Drives, the 1st Maxtor was replaced and returned as well. Hitachi/Excelstor were looking good, while duff Maxtors started appearing (under warranty 9-18 months old), Hitachi/Excelstor drives have also come back in bulk so dont think they are better, I have had to use data recovery S/W on my best freinds Excelstor 60GB (18 months old).
I have had 2 120GB 2MB DM9's one died on the 13th month (12 month warranty) the other is still going (I dont trust it) and doenst have anything important on it.
You may be wondering where WD get mentioned in this, well as we have only ever sold 1 DM drive and have not seen it back, it must have the best reliability % wise, however I dont trust WD at all in any shape or form.
The reason why I dont trust them is that their diagnostic software LIES. On several occasions I have run their software (latest version, full scan) it has claimed that the drives are OK, when they are blatantly faulty. Would you trust a manufacturer who lies and says "dont worry all of your precious data is perfectly safe". I will never even try a WD drive until their software actually detects their drives as bad when they are so BLATANTLY bad, and I nearly forgot, we see quite a lot off WD drives, I would say they ae no more or less reliable than Hitachi (Excelstor) or Maxtor.
Any more questions about my experiences with drives are more than welcome.
I now have a 90% hit rate of identifying Hitachi Travelstars by their noise, they are unique sounding, and about 25% of them are faulty, this is to be taken with a pich of salt as 75% of the laptop drives I see are Hitachi, dont let this frighten you unless you own one
Andy
PS: I pulled a WD 160GB drive out of someones HELL machine 2 weeks ago, I hope its not the same batch as yours
14ish months old, DUFF, oh yeah I nearly forgot WD say its fine, so I best save all of my important data onto it right now.