Yep, it was especially bad because IBM had the gold standard for drives before that point. They were more expensive, but you paid for the reliability, so people got really angry when they started failing regularly.

From what I can tell, they fixed those problems and went back to the high quality but slightly more expensive drives of old. The most interesting part is that Backblaze still buys mostly Seagates, simply because they are easier to buy in bulk and have a better price. Even though they fail more often the failure rate isn't bad enough to be a problem. Also, Seagate's failure rate has been decreasing as they release new drives.

me too. I wonder if there is a cycle where companies have a terrible reputation then overcompensate, presumably they'll slowly get worse reliability from here on as they focus on costs instead of failure rates.

It would also be interesting to see if the personnel involved in the engineering correlated with failure rates.