I've never had any problems with any of my personal hard drives (the one's I use daily and store my stuff on). I have had plenty of old problematic hard drives that would have been used for PCs for sale had they not died. I haven't had much luck with Maxtor HDDs. I think only one Maxtor I've ever owned is still working... One of them makes a weird beeping (best way to explain it) that you could probably add as a beat to a song, lol.
I got a 40GB HDD (Seagate) right now that's got several thousand errors in the first 3% of scanning it... I didn't bother to carry it on any further as it had been scanning for several hours to get to 3%. I had another 40GB (Western Digital) with several hundred errors in all, I'm pretty sure I fixed them all though, and I am happy because I paid $20 for that drive...