All brands fail at a fairly high rate.
Particular models and particular manufacturing runs within any particular brand may have unusually high failure rates. The result is that some people think a particular brand is great, and others think it's trash - depends on whether they got one of those lots. I remember one Toshiba model I used years ago, where every single drive died in less than two years (with loud clanking noises).
I had particularly good luck with Fujitsu, but they've pulled out of the desktop drive business. Haven't had any IBM IDE failures, but haven't used that many of their drives (and they're cashing in the drive chips too). Have had more failures than I like with IBM SCSI drives, but not as bad as Seagate (never used any of those 80-Gig IBMs which failed early and often). I've never liked Maxtors much, but there's not a lot left right now with consistent availability.
A lot of system builders swear by Western Digital, but my experience hasn't been that good (and I'm very annoyed that jumpering is different between "single" and "master", so you have to change jumpers if you add or remove anything else on the cable. That alone disqualifies them as far as I'm concerned.
Seagates have just given me bad experiences more consistently than other brands. Their early 3" drives were the worst ever - I couldn't get them out the door before they failed.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
