Up until last year I was running 4 250MB (yes MB) maxtor scsi drives striped. Those drives are at least 13 years old. Never had so much as a hiccup from them, but needed the physical space for more drives, so they are now in the scrap heap. Maxtor _used_ to be the measuring stick for other drives. Seagate is/was the walmart of drives... They are way better now though.
I used to work for a company that used seagate's exclusively in one of their new products (a drive array cabinet, a precursor to the nas systems you see now), and one batch of seagate's we got in had ~85% failure rate. We went through almost 200 drives trying to find a working one, then thinking the product had engineering defects, it was sent back to manufacturing for testing only to find out there was nothing wrong with it. Seagate admitted the screw up, paid my company big bucks not to drop their drives (they did anyway), and then tried to hide the fact that several thousand drives were completely useless when used in any sort of raid function. Took them many years to recover from that screwup.