Hard drives are very quirky things. Ask around and i bet you will be able to find groups of people that have horror stories about every single harddrive model. The fact is that there are so many working parts in a computer that having something going wrong isnt so much a question of will it, but when will it. Hard drives have a lot of moving parts and its understandable that you are going to get a bad few off of a production line.
Having said that, i personally only use WD as i think they are the best. Yet only a couple of posts ago it was said that someone had to return three of them. It just comes down to personal preference i guess.