The 1TB Barracuda ES.2 was hardly better. Around 2009-2010, I've set up 3000 of them. 1800 had to be replaced under warranty.
After that we switched to HGST and never looked back. For the thousands of Helium HGST/WD drives I've set up since 2014, I had to replace only a handful of them overall. In fact my support account generally needs a password reset because it's been sitting unused for 1 year straight... Contrast that with the awful time when I was spending half my days replacing Seagate drives, and the other half asking for RMAs...
After that we switched to HGST and never looked back. For the thousands of Helium HGST/WD drives I've set up since 2014, I had to replace only a handful of them overall. In fact my support account generally needs a password reset because it's been sitting unused for 1 year straight... Contrast that with the awful time when I was spending half my days replacing Seagate drives, and the other half asking for RMAs...