I think you are referring to the IBM Deskstar HDDs before they were bought over by Hitachi. We used to call them Deathstars.
Yeah i've also used many drives while most failures were Seagates in my case & 1 WD failure but no Hitachi failure till date.I prefer Hitachis over Seagate.
i got the seagate. was caught in between WD & seagate but eventually decided to give seagate another try since the review favour the seagate 500gb~!
Seagate's .10 & .11 has improved a lot than the previous 7200.9 series.Specially the .10 based 250GB drive which i'm using now is a very fast drive because of the PR technology & having a single platter also should last more than the drives with 4-5 platters.Although the .10 250GB Seagate runs pretty fast but it's still 5-6C hotter than my other Hitachi drive.Anyways, anyone tried the WD VelociRaptor drives yet ? They are supposed to be the fastest drive ?
I have a heap of drives, mainly WD and Samsung (and 400 or 500gb) and I have found that unless I actualy run a benchmark I cant tell the difference most of the time. That said, over the years I have killed less Samsungs then anything else