I think that WD's crap is a fairly recent thing. I have a 212MB and a 740MB drive, both of which are WD. I'm currently using both of them. I got them both new, one in a prebuilt system and one retail and they are about ten years old.

OTOH, I got a WD drive just over a year ago and it's already toast.

Their SCSI drives seem to be a lot better, though; I used them a lot in a job a while back. Except that they don't make them anymore. Oh, well.