The answer is...
None of them. Seriously, any of the major manufacturers produce some good quality devices and sometimes they produce crap. WD did it, Seagate did id, Maxtor did it - all of them did it.
I understand that if you have some really bad luck with a certain series of drives, you'll most likely avoid the manufacturer in the future. For me, this is Maxtor - some bad luck years ago when 3 identical drives died in a row, within less than a week. Which gave me the pleasure to install Windows and all my stuff 4 times in that time period. The first one died so fast that I didn't even have time to make a disc image for faster recovery
After reinstalling on the replaced drive, I postponed making the recovery stuff, because i thought another HD failure soon should be highly unlikely. My fault. It died 2 days later. The next replacement died while I finished installing Windows. Highly pissed, I decided to drop Maxtor and get a Seagate. Problem solved though I do know that there are many satisfied Maxtor customers and I simply had some very bad luck.
I still have two 8GB IBM deskstar drives, built in 1998 which both ran for many, many years. Last time I checked, they are still fine though I do no longer use it, because 8GB is not really exciting storage capacity today.
I do remember there was a major issue with one of the later IBM DeskStar series causing abnormally high failure rates which resulted in people referring to them as DeathStar