When I was doing IT work for a software company in rochester we had maxtors and western digitals failing DAILY. Literally every day I was shipping hard drives back and forth to Dell for replacement.
I’d buy seagate only because they have a much better warranty than the others (may have changed now that companies have merged though). Quiet, dependable, perform well, etc.
My 1.5TB (RAID6) array in the basement is mostly western digital with only a few seagates but so far so good. You really can’t ask about reliability talking to most consumers … people either have never had their hard drive fail or they’ve had one or two fail. Everyone has manufacturing defects from time to time.
Yes the hundreds and hundreds of hard drives I saw fail while working for that software company were all maxtor and wd, but that’s all Dell puts in their crap. I’ve personally had 2 hitachi hard drives fail in my laptop (which does have IBM active hard drive protection) but I still wouldn’t write them off.
It’s a tough call, which is why I only recommend seagate because of their much longer warranties. With any choice you make though, back shit up! Go with an online backup company with some sort of automatic backup software or buy an external hard drive large enough to hold whatever important documents you have.