It used to be Seagate, back when I gave a shit about this sort of thing and Western Digital drives were "lol". Sadly, I've had 4 seagate failures in the last 2 years and have basically said "no more".

I'm told it's because they bought out Maxtor and started using shitty Maxtor bits, but whatever, they suck now as far as I can tell 1st hand experience.

Who makes the good drives these days? I'm talking platter drives, Solid State is perhaps a little too early in it's life to really have good solid info.

doesnt matter. buy cheapest

I have a WD external and a WD internal and they've both done me pretty well.

a sample size of 2
well shit bunk get right on that shit

My sample size is 6, with 4 failures. I'll take 2 with 0 failures any time, but on top of that, I'm going to do away entirely with solo disks and do nothing but USB raid from now on. Disk failures isn't something that has affected me much over the years, but in the last 4 to 6 years the quality of these drives has hit new lows, I'm not even convinced raid can offer much protection.

I'v had a lot of WD drives. like 5 and none have broken down so far. Some of them was from the olden days when Hitachi and IBM made them tho.

The only drives I have had that broke were from seagate.

I roll an Intel ssd disk at work (gets really tough workout by the enormous amounts of delete/create/read of files I do compiling) and its been working great for a bit over a year now.

seagate and wd are both alright these days. ssd samsung, intel

I use 3 WD HDDs, 0 failures or problems over 5 years

never had a seagate failure (sample ~10, i've retired some, 3 running in this pc, 2 running in another). recently one of my wd hdd near-failed (lots of write errors, but i can still read IF it spins up), bought another seagate. hitachi failure rate for me is 1/1.

FYI something to notice in general is the fact that different disks are sold under the same name and product code, e.g for a 2TB seagate it is possible to get a 3x666GB or 2x1TB platter one, but the latter one is supposedly about 30% faster. the only ways to differentiate is by weight (if you can get your hands on one, gl with online shopping), a small groove on the casing, or possibly a digit in the serial number. i ordered blindly with intent to return if i get the 3x666, but was lucky.