I've never personally owned any WD drives. I've only ever used them when I worked at ATI where I saw an inordinate number of them go tits up in various Macs.

For personal use I've primarily used Seagate since the early 90's (all SCSI in the 90's) with a bunch of Maxtor (PATA) spread in there as well. All my SATA drives have been Seagate except for a single Maxtor. I've had 2 Maxtors and 2 Seagate drives die. One of them (can't remember which) was my fault for connecting a power plug from an external case upside down.