If you want real data instead of feels, look at the BackBlaze report they publish every year. Even within a particular manufacturer varying models can have widely different failure stats.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/

buying tech products by brand allows brands to sell you a shitty product at premium price points. companies will always shit out bad eggs at times, and its your job to know which product line are bad and not let brand loyalty bypass that.

at the bare minimum, if you are buying by brand, buy it solely based on customer support, as some companies are significantly better at that than others, which is an objective trait.

HGST personally, because my failure count over time for those drives has been in the single digits through ~60 drives in around 15 years, though every manufacturer is going to have missteps or failures. I can say I’ve had bad experiences with Toshiba, but I’m sure you can find someone who swears by them also. Ultimately my anecdotal evidence in either direction is an unreliable crystal ball you should take with a grain of salt.

The suggestion to check Backblaze reports is great, but I’d also recommend to vary your manufacturers if you’re able and instead build your storage solution with the assumption that drives are “wear units” and will fail. If you have some redundancy built in where you’re able to tolerate the failure of one (or ideally multiple) drive failures without losing data, then even though the question still matters, it matters a bit less.

None, I buy whatever is cheapest so that I can have spares for an eventual failure.

Whatever is cheapest out of established brands, that is. WD, Seagate, etc., not JIOFUI brand drives from Amazon