I had a similar experience with Samsung. I had a bunch of evo 870 SSDs up and die for no reason. Turns out, it was a firmware bug in the drive and they just need an update, but the update needs to take place before the drive fails.

I had to RMA the failures. The rest were updated without incident and have been running perfectly ever since.

I'd still buy Samsung.

I didn't lose a lot of data, but I can certainly understand holding a grudge on something like that. From the other comments here, hate for Seagate isn't exactly rare.

I can certainly understand holding grudges against corporations. I didn’t buy anything from Sony for a very long time after their fuckery with George Hotz and Nintendo's latest horseshit has me staying away from them, but that was a single firmware bug that locked down hard drives (note, the data was still intact) a very long time ago. Seagate even issued a firmware update to prevent the bug from biting users it hadn’t hit yet, but firmware updates at the time weren’t really something people thought to ever do, and operating systems did not check for them automatically back then like they do now.

Seagate fucked up but they also did everything they could to make it right. That matters. Plus, look at their competition. WD famously lied about their red drives not being SMR when they actually were. And I’ve only ever had WD hard drives and sandisk flash drives die on me. And guess who owns sandisk? Western Digital!

I guess if you must go with a another company, there’s the louder and more expensive Toshiba drives but I have never used those before so I know nothing about them aside from their reputation for being loud.

but then wd and their fake red nas drives with smr tech?

what else we have?