HDDs have high failure rate, regardless of brand. Many people will tell you that Seagate sucks although in my experience it is WD that sucks (I have 3 WD Blue that either failed or close to being dead). There are only three HDD manufacturers left: WD, Seagate, and Toshiba; Hitachi is bought by WD.
In my opinion the best way to store data is to burn them on Blu Ray (BD-R). In fact dollar per GB wise single layer BD-R (25 GB) is cheaper than HDD.
At this rate I just end up going with whatever fits the budget better, though I tend to have a preference for WD.
I've had probably 3 ST drives die on me over the years, and I've had probably 3 or 4 WD drives die on me over the years.
But I've got a 2.5" ST that's been used heavily for the Wii, a 3.5" 50)GB ST that's been my boot drive for a few years, and a pair of 1TB ST drives that are set up in a hardware RAID1 as media, games, documents, warez storage and backup (hence RAID1) for years. All of those have been chugging along for a few years without incident.
And then I've got a used 2.5" 100GB WD that serves (used to, and will once I get it set up again) a 3.5"1.5TB WD that used to be an external for backing up my Minecraft server three times a week and is now used for media storage and streaming, and a 3.5" 1TB WD that came out of my desktop to go into my server for, again, more media storage and streaming. All of these have been chugging along for a few years without incident as well.
Make backups of your backups. For the most longevity and protection against failure, if it's important to you, back your info up to a hard drive for accessibility, and then back up in 25GB increments to BD-R disks and keep those in a water- and fire-proof safe/lock box for archival purposes. Some might see that as overkill, myself included, but if you're willing to put forth a considerable sum of money to get your data recovered in a lab, it might seem like a viable plan of attack in the future.
Edit - and for the hell of it, 2x 2.5" 320GB WD Blue, refurbished and bought from Newegg, that have been in use in Xbox 360 consoles as the primary hard drive, going through tons of game writes and reads, including installing the disk based games to the hard drive. And those are still going strong too.
