All I buy is western digital and seagate external hard drives. My wife has a seagate that is about 2 years old and still going good.
One issue that I had, a western digital drive came from the factory formatted as fat32 instead of ntfs. Which is no big deal, except some of the files were bigger then 4 gigs and would not fit on the fat32 file system. So I just converted the drive to ntfs.
I have a total of 3 external hard drives - all of them seagate.
My wife has 2 external seagates
We have a western digital here at the office.