Seagate was once one of the most reputed and trusted brand for hard disk drives (HDD). Seagate HDDs were both fast and reliable. I myself have trusted and recommended the brand for years. But ever since their notorious firmware problem with the Barracuda 7200.11 series, which prevents the HDD to be detected by system BIOS, I have lost my faith in Seagate. Although there are four major bugs in the firmware of 7200.11 family, this one affected a large number of users. At first Seagate refused to acknowledge this as a major issue and heavily moderated its official forum where large number of people reported this problem. Then they released firmware updates and later also offered free data recovery service for drives affected with this firmware issue. The brand reputation was heavily hit and loyal customers moved to other brands like Western Digital (WD). Then came the all new Barracuda 7200.12 family. Although this series of HDDs have no major firmware issues, they were highly unreliable and have high failure rates compared to other brands.
Just check the customer reviews in Newegg.com (Popular online retailer) of Seagate HDDs compared to other brands such as WD.
Seagate has 55% reviews as Excellent and 22% reviews as Very Poor. If we go by these numbers then there is almost a fifty-fifty chance that your Seagate HDD is gonna die.
Here you can see customers reviews of WD Caviar Blue (similar functionality and price as Seagate Barracuda 7200.12) with 70% Excellent and just 9% as Very Poor. Although the number of reviews is a lot lesser than Seagate, but still nowadays WD seems to be more reliable than Seagate.
Also Seagate has now reduced their warranty from 5 years to 3 years. But other manufacturers have also reduced warranty to 3 years as a cost cutting measure. Still WD offers its Caviar Black series with 5 years of warranty, but its costlier and targeted to high end users.
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