All hard drives have a failure percentage, so I would not trust my data on any brand; I would trust it on multiple locations including some optical media and only store on a hard drive for quick access.

Asking individuals who might have owned 1-10 hard drives across an 8-year span will not give you substantial data for your search for the most reliable brand.
However, working on a major OEM computer manufacturer, I have seen RMA numbers on a region-wide scale (Europe, Middle East & Africa) and I can safely say that I will not be buying a Maxtor hard drive, ever.
While all the other manufacturers have a similarly low failure of about 4-5%, Maxtor is on the double digits (~16%). These metrics are based on several 100,000's of hard drives sold and not on the "I have a 123Gb Seagate drive since 2003 and it's still working" personal experience.

What I don't know is if the fact that Seagate started having more frequent firmware issues (especially when they resemble the Maxtor Calypso drives fiasco) has anything to do with the fact that they have absorbed a lot of Maxtor employees on several of their departments, following the acquisition.