HGST (now owned by WD) never seemed to acquire a bad reputation. Always top of the charts in Backblaze's drive statistics. Longest warranties. I was sad when they got bought. Their factory still seems to produce better drives than WD in general, as of a couple years ago.
IBM drives were almost perfect :) I still dont know what the problem with Deskstar GXP was, were those firs IBM drives with Hoya glass platters? After fixing this one problem they became the best drives on the market under Hitachi.
Sorry, I should have included the qualifier recent.
Western Digital has had several recent high profile data loss issues
Of course you won't find a storage vendor with a spotless history, but Western Digital flash devices are spontaneously failing in the past 2 years and there's no solid indication that they've actually fixed the root cause in the affected products.
Western Digital has had several high profile data loss issues across multiple product lines: Western Digital SN850 [1], SanDisk Extreme [2].
Western Digital's response has been very PR and not at all helpful toward the people who have lost data due to the faults in their products.
Storage products have one job: reliably store your data. WD has shown lately that you roll the dice if your choose their products.
[1] https://community.frame.work/t/tracking-wd-black-sn850-sudde...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/sandisk-extreme-ssds...