Harddisk failure depends on luck usually, unless it's a bad batch. Maxtor is the worst years back, I bought a few for my friends and relatives, only a few survive, the rest RMA after few months, some even sent a few times.
Till date, I've RMA IBM (Hitachi now), Seagate, WD, Fujitsu and Samsung harddisks. So if I were to base on personal experiences on the various brands, what else can I buy? I also have some hitachi, seagate and WD working for years without fail.
My point is, it depends how lucky you are. Harddisk can fail any moment regardless of brand, just make more than one backup to your valuable data and photos.
For critical stuffs, can consider putting in a thumbdrive, failure rates are much lower than any harddisk since no moving parts. So far, I've no encounter of thumbdrive or memory card that fails. For harddisk, lost count already.
