I've been less concerned about the brand and reliability of a drive than whether I've used a good back-up strategy. If you assuming that any of your drives can fail at any time, you have a far lower chance of being pimped.
I rsync early and often. I'm actually to the point of expanding my rsync strategy from 3 drives to 5. It's currently; daily driver, and 2 to rsync off of it (1 off site, one on sight that gets synced often). I'm looking at adding another 1 to both the general backup and immediate backup/mirror sections and really fleshing out the rotation and backups.
Second, I label the "birthday" of each drive and some notes about how much use it's seen. This won't account for immediate failures like kirk's, but it will give me an idea of when I need to rotate one from daily driver to off site backup.
Drive companies are a lot of like empires; all good things fall. It's a shame because Maxtor and Seagate used to be great. I once took a Maxtor drive apart, had a PC repair class play with the platers (with their fingers) and put it back together so we didn't lose any pieces. It got mixed into the general pool by accident and didn't find it until about a month later after we'd formatted it and installed linux on it and used it for a bit. I don't think that's possible now.