"Seagate" and "reliability" together is an oxymoron.
"Seagate" and "reliability" together is an oxymoron, and I've a box of dozens of dead drives, mostly Seagate, to prove it.
In my post to the El Reg story "Do you think spinning rust eats flash's dust? Join the hard drive daddies club" of 14 August, I gave good reasons for it (and I suggested what Seagate should do about the problem to improve customer confidence):
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2013/08/14/keep_the_platters_spinning_club_formed/#c_1925303
In this announcement, not one of the issues that I raised in that August post has been addressed by Seagate, yet its hard disk densities are still creeping up and up (and seemingly the reliability still creeping down and down).
Yes, so it's now possible to pack densities of >1TB onto a singe platter—big deal! However, it's of very little practical use if at whim one's data just wafts off into the aether shortly later. Absolutely nothing in this story convinces me that Seagate has made any of these drives more reliable, and it's time we unfortunate consumers started whingeing loudly about the problem.
It's all very well having a track up Everest, albeit comparatively well worn since 1953, but it's not a path the average punter strolls along on a Sunday afternoon.
Announcements from Seagate about 'Everest'-type hard disk densities might well be headline-grabbing, but in the light of its very questionable past record with respect to the reliability of its hard disks, I wouldn't touch these new disks from Seagate with a barge pole.