My Hitachi experiences:
IBM drive, 120GXP, head crash. Sent back, got a Hitachi labeled 180GXP. 44 days later, click of death.
I also have 5 Hitachi drives in a RAID 5 array, or rather, HAD. After I had 2 IBM/Hitachi drives die like that, which were supposedly safe (not the defective 60GXP and 75GXP lines), I decided I wasn't going to risk it anymore. I took the Hitachi 5 drives off the array and ran a full surface scan on each, and then checked the SMART readout of some. Though Spinrite 6 reported no bad sectors, the SMART on two drives reported 7 and 40 reallocated sectors. So they're already starting to use up their bad sector reallocation pool, and they aren't even a year old. The remaining 3 haven't had their SMART output checked yet. I'm now running Seagate drives.
For the record though, I do have a 30GB IBM Travelstar in my laptop, and even though it's a slow-as-a-dead-turtle 4200rpm drive, it hasn't given me any problems.