u/First_Musician6260

Hell, Seagate is the best example. Barracuda 7200.9 for instance led the entire consumer sector with its 5-year warranty (unprecedented up to that point since establishing a universal 5-year warranty in 2004 among all Barracudas) and were actually very good drives, but then they acquired Maxtor in '06 and everything went downhill. Barracuda 7200.11 released late in 2007 with its flagrantly heinous 2400 hours per year rating (with its up-sold ES.2 relative having the proper 24x7 spec, despite being the same mechanically) and users reported failures within just a year of using them thanks mostly to firmware-related flaws. The 7200.12 series addressed the firmware problems but still inherited deliberately rough CSS head landings from Maxtor's fraudulent DiamondMax/MaXLIne drives and thus were also not good. Their greatest low was evidently the GrenadaBP platform and its tendency to crash, most notably manifesting in the ST3000DM001's that resulted in a class-action lawsuit. While nowadays the Barracudas haven't come close to that low since, they're still very mediocre.

WD, who was generally the most well-respected manufacturer next to Seagate (before Seagate's merger with Maxtor), was unfortunately also dragged down to the same substandard level as Seagate; the mid to late 2000s Caviars (not including the GP's or Greens) were generally solid drives but WD did not boost their warranties to 5 years like Seagate. Eventually, when WD were forced to implement cost-down measures to be on par with Seagate competitively, the warranty on the then Caviar Blues was cut down to a meager 2 years, on par with Seagate's 14th generation Barracudas (the same ones that scored failure rates above 30 to 40 percent in just 2-3 years), and future Blues have since been not as reliable, including the otherwise highly praised WD10EZEX. Caviar Blacks (and eventually WD Black) did however carry 5-year warranties, although they were essentially just lower bins of higher end product segments for the most part (namely RE3/RE4 at the time) and as such were in a different segment on their own terms from the Blues.

At least Hitachi still stood out, though; from 2006 onward they gave all Deskstars 24x7 capabilities in their respective data sheets and product manuals, and continued to carry that torch until they sold their storage division to WD (and the 5-platter flagships were also very well built, even by that time's standards, and subsequently recorded very respectable rates in Backblaze's servers). However, since the Deskstars are no more, we can't have a proper high-quality consumer HDD anymore. The Blues have very much fallen from grace (with some using SMR and actually being reportedly unreliable), the Barracudas aren't great, and Toshiba's alternatives aren't attractive either.

So that leaves the lower binned high-end drives like WD Black, FireCuda (not including the shameless 2.5 inch Rosewoods with their abhorrent quality), and X300 (Pro). They're actually quite good, but still not as good as what used to be. I don't want to promote the shoehorned "NAS" drives either, being that the lower capacity ones are just as mediocre as their mainstream brethren but perhaps a little better stability wise. I'm sure some would recall using HDDs from the early to mid 2000s (largely outside of IBM, but also Maxtor later on) and having pleasant experiences with them, but that luxury is unfortunately no more. Thus, many are convinced to use SSDs, but those also have their own issues.