It's not just Seagate, it's everybody. Seagate, Hitachi, Toshiba, Western Digital, I've replaced them all and all have the same rate of failure.
Drives becoming more and more unreliable is just a consequence of 1950s magnetic record player technology being squeezed to the limit. We were never intended to have 1+ TB HDD :awe:
Personally, prior to SSD I've at some point had just about every generation Raptor (WD) and Cheetah (Seagate) made since the first generation drives were only 18GB and I've never had a single one fail or show a single "bad mark" in SMART even with years of constant use. They were either replaced with higher capacity or faster drives as they became available, or were retired to "scrap" PCs that were used by guests or eventually given away. If those drives didn't get hot, I don't know what does.
The last set of desktop dino drives to leave my house, 2 x 74 GB Raptors went out the door to a new home with zero SMART errors with 7 years of use, including 3 years of hard WoW play in a 24/7 "on" desktop "gaming" environment. I know the person I gave my 4 x 18 GB Cheetah X15s and Mylex 352 i960 card to just to screw with and they are still running good as new, and they are what over 10 years old?