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.