Do you think the seagate barracuda deserves to take the “death star” title from HGST? I think HGST has redeemed themselves with sub 1% failure rates for years. Seagate managed to put out a 30% failure rate drive.
The "Death Star" title really belongs only to that one specific model (75GXP) produced by IBM and its spectacular failure mode (shredding the magnetic media off the platter almost entirely in some cases)
I've never gotten to hear one fail, but these were the way I learned never to use drives from a single batch in a RAID array back in the day (most of the time these days I never match models in a single array and try to avoid matching manufacturers; gotten paranoid over the years after successive RAID failures)
Thankfully it was just stressful - we had backups, but drives in our array started failing one by one, with about a weeks interval; unfortunately it took something like 4 days to rebuild the array each time, so we wasted a lot of time shifting writes elsewhere so the last backup we had + writes going elsewhere combined remained recent enough in case a second drive would fail. We got off easy, but the time we spent probably cost us more than having set up a more redundant system in the first time would have.
I'm not sure about today, but 4 years ago we bought 120 HP notebooks from Verizon (they had cell modems in them) to use with a project. We had a horrendous failure rate of 100 hard drives in the first six months. They were Seagate drives. We ended up just replacing the remaining 20s hard drives as a preventative measure.