1/5th of Newegg reviews give it 1 star!!! Most of those 1 stars involve drive failure. Seagate has not learned the lesson of the past... clearly.
Sadly, these two things are related. The DOA reviews on Newegg are mostly Newegg's fault, but there are lots of users reporting failures about 7-10 months in. This is a known problem where
the heads wear down over time. The less you use the drive, the less the head suffers, hence they will not warrant the drive if you run it beyond the rated workload.
The drive records its usage, so they'll know. According to the manual:
Rated workload: Average rate of <55TB/year. The MTBF specification for the drive assumes the I/O workload does not exceed the average annualized workload rate limit of 55TB/year. Workloads exceeding the annualized rate may degrade the drive MTBF and impact product reliability. The average annualized workload rate limit is in units of TB per year, or TB per 8760 power-on hours. Workload rate limit = TB transferred × (8760/recorded power-on hours).
Ironically, 55TB/year on a 3TB HDD means it's about 100 times less durable than an typical MLC SSD. But that's really just Seagate covering their asses on the warranty. The great majority of these drives won't have any issues with head wear; it's a contamination problem, so it varies enormously from batch to batch and improves modestly from generation to generation. The problem was incredibly bad in the 7200.11 era and the technology to get rid of it is only now showing up in the Constellation ES.3 line. So it's unfair to say that Seagate isn't learning from their mistakes, as it takes many years to push fixes through the pipeline. But it is fair to say that they should have known about this problem to begin with.
At least with respect to head wear, even a bad unit should work just fine if you use it within the stated limits... which I'm not, so that's equivalent to gambling on having good units.