Don't take this personally but this advice is fairly useless.

For every person like you, who has "found Hitachi to be the most reliable" and "had universally bad luck with Seagate", there's someone else who has the exact opposite advice.

Our opinions are shaped by our own experiences, of course, and (most of the tine) it's hard to change our minds or convince us otherwise.

The (unfortunate) truth is that there's no one brand of HDDs that really is "the best" -- especially for all use cases! If there were, well, we'd all be using them by now and all of the other manufacturers would have already went out of business.