Actually years ago the worst hard drives were the IBM then Hitachi drives.
All of the manufactures have had higher failure rates with drives above 500 Gigs than drives below that capacity. This is probably heat related since the larger the drive’s capacity the more work it has to do to retreive the data.
I have always followed this policy for my computers. The First or main drive, no more than 250 gigs split in two equal partitions. One for the OS and Programs, the other for a hidden backup using Acronis True Image.
THen all of my files, pictures, music and other stuff is stored on a second drive of 500 gigs or less. Finally I keep a backup of hte computer and all of the files, music, pictures on an external drive that I update once a month.
As for the large drives since storage use exploded I've gone to the 1Tb drives, have eight of them in two NAS boxes and they're doing fine. I'm trying to remember how old the oldest box is and man, it's "ancient", an old Freedom9 box that they don't even support any longer and nary a glitch showing up on any of the SMART attributes other than what you'd expect with 24/7 usage.
Don't get me wrong, I'm either RAID or backed up but I've had good luck with the large drives as long as they were WD.
Don't get me started on Seagate....