Just had a Seagate Barracuda fail 30days old. Generation 11 Seagate drives were failing at an epidemic rate and covered up. Mine was a generation 12 and it failed too. My guess is that Seagate may be planning to grab what money they can before SSDs take over. For a few more bucks you can get a Hitatchi with much faster Read/Write speeds. If your on an absolute budget go WD. IMO.
I, too, have had less than stellar luck with Seagates. Two years ago, I experienced five HD failures in the course of a single year, all but two of which were Seagate.
On the other hand, two of the the drives were replaced by Seagate drives (sometimes different models), and both have been solid ever since. The third, I haven't bothered to return because it was a PATA drive that I won't ever use again anyway. If they last past the first year, you probably are in good shape; the oldest one of mine that died was at about the 9 month mark.
And the reason I had more Seagates die is that I had more drives die. That one year, I lost every single hard drive I owned that was under a year old plus one older drive. All of them. One WD, one Hitachi, the rest Seagate. That year was a bloodbath, and reminded me that hard drives by EVERY vendor are ALL crap.
SSDs should eventually improve things, but for now, we have to put up with hard drives. Thus, remember to keep multiple offline backups of everything on multiple disks.
