I always preferred Seagate spinning steel over Western Digital. I've had some WD drives fail horribly, unexpectedly and very prematurely on me. My PC today still has some Seagate HDDs in it that are approaching 15 years of age.
I had the opposite experience. Though 15 years ago was around the time I worked at a computer shop and I recall quality between the two comps flip flopping. On a side note, that was also the era of Asus capacitors failing at a surprisingly high rate.