I think there's some selection bias as Seagate drives are fairly abundant in oem systems where the oems included the lowest tier drive possible to shave some cost off which may be less well built and more susceptible to damage over time from vibration/impacts than higher tier drives.

I suspect that most of the time after a hard drive failure the drive gets replaced with a higher tier drive (typically from another manufacturer like WD as the person feels burnt by Seagate for having a hdd failure) which may prove more reliable.

That's my wild speculation anyways.

Well, JFYI, in 2009 (starting 2009, last user posted a few days ago) there was the great Seagate 7200.11 Bricking Season (unrelated to quality of the actual hardware, the issues were related to firmware) that killed so many disks (most of which could be revived) that I guess noone hasn't had one or knew not someone with the issue (or heard someone talking of the matter).

By any metric a thread on an all in all "niche" technical board with almost 5,000 posts and nearly 4,700,000 views should mean that a lot of people experienced the issue:

https://msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate...

There was a certain line of Seagate 3TB drives that seemed particularly prone to failure, as reflected in consumer reports as well as Backblaze's statistics at the time:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001

- https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/

Later Seagate drives don't seem to be worse than the competition, but memories of that infamous drive model still linger.