Well I'm hoping it is all good for now...
I've had 4 drives fail on me in various machines...
2 Seagate, 2 Western Digital.
1st was a 1 GB IDE that failed sometime in 2005 (I think). I had used it as the C:\ drive for Win98. I had an additional 100GB WD for all the games, downloads, etc.
That one died because when I got a newer drive for the OS, I copied what I needed off of the drive, but it was running on top of the small tower that I had. The desk got bumped sliding it off the edge, the controller board on the bottom of the drive touched the case and fried the drive.
The next drive to go out was that 100GB WD IDE a few years later.
WD had identified a flaw in the (first I think) batch of drives that mine was in, and they were going to all fail within about a year or so. At the time I didn't have a means to back it up. So I saved for another drive. The 100GB did finally "die" at around 5-6 years old.
In the mean time it had been the "game drive", the download drive, and the "Copy the mod from here" drive. It was also the "swap file" drive.
I replaced this drive with a WD 160GB IDE drive, Initially a secondary drive in a AMD 2500XP that I got from a friend. After I had to replace the MB in the system, I tossed the Maxtor that got a new bad sector just about every day, and I used this WD160 for everything.
WinXP, Fedora Core 3, swap, and games.
This one died in my AMD 5600x2 in the end of 2014, which prompted me to install Fedora 20 on an older WD 40GB IDE that is currently still funtional (and F20 is still installed)...
The 4th and final was that Seagate 2TB. It is also the only drive to have failed anywhere near the warranty period. I think the 2TB actually out-lived its 1 year warranty.
I have noticed this with the newer Seagate drives: My older 1TB is labeled as a "Seagate Barracuda", with the newer labeled as a "Seagate Desktop".
The older drive is faster, regardless of which test that you run on it with the bench marking software.
The 2TB that I just purchased to "fix" my RAID, is labeled as a 'Barracuda', the other 3, and the failed drive are labeled as "Desktop"...
The New "Barracuda" drive is, again, faster in all benchmarks that I've run (read/write, random seek time).
I'm hoping with the return to the "Barracuda" name, marks the return of the reliability that I have come to expect from older Seagates.
My WD on the other hand, are just outright expensive.... The 1TB finally dropped to within $5 of the Seagate 2TB.
I really wanted 15K rpm SAS drives, or at least 10K rpm WD Raptors for this FX-8350, but they were REALLY hard to find...
And again, long winded......
Also, NO, my name didn't come from the hard drive... I've been using this name much longer!
Barracuda