Don't be ashamed: for a pretty long time Seagates really were very reliable, the 7200.9 and 10 series were a staple in my systems throughout the last couple years. Seagates also used to have a 5 year warranty period. I'm actually thankful that the Seagates I've bought more recently tend to suffer from crib death: better it dies immediately rather than die once I've put my trust in it.

As others have said though, these things tend to go in cycles. One manu. gets a bunch of bum drives, people react and they start cracking the whip on QC. I think it's also a product of what we're asking of our drives today: SSDs are eating away at the low end so their only recourse is to pack more and more data into smaller and smaller spaces leading to a greater reliance on error correction.

I will say though, the BackBlaze report led me to try out HGST drives for the first time and I've been overwhelmingly satisfied with them.

That said, will that trend continue? I guess we'll see when the 2015 report comes out.

Yev from Backblaze here -> No reason to be ashamed! Truth is we still buy Seagates! Most likely they will work well enough in a home environment. All drives fail eventually. If you can get 3-4 years out of one, that's great!

Yes but usually people come to me because I'm the tech guy and they expect something better then "Take whatever you want. They'll all make it through the first 3-4 years" ;)

The worst part of it is: my own HDs are all Seagates and I use them longer then that...