I have heard allot of good things about HGST drives.
So i think you will be allright with that.
I have generally retrieved hard drives from burned-out laptops. Most of the hard drives I've had die are 3.5" drives, I have had very few 2.5" drives die on me. The vast majority of the ones I have left are Toshiba and Hitachi drives.
If I'm going for bulletproof storage and I don't need terabytes upon terabytes of it, I go full-solid-state. I'm amassing a collection of them, actually.
Luck is a factor of course but that's because there are no certainties. That's why we have statistical analysis. If you choose a drive that statistically has less chance of failure then statistically you're more likely to be "lucky" enough to get a good drive that will last long.
I still use a 500Gb Hitachi drive from January 2009 for media and some older games that don't need to be on an SSD to load fast. And I have a 1Tb WD Blue as well.
As for SSD's I have one Kingston HyperX Fury 120Gb that I use for OS, most used programs and a few games and a 256Gb Samsung 850 Pro Evo that I just got a little over a month ago so I can't comment on its reliability. But I got it because virtually everyone else said that it's the best SSD for the money.
I hope so, I took it through a validation according to this thread on OCN http://www.overclock.net/t/1493080/how-to-validate-new-drives-before-deployment and it passed so fingers crossed
I took a risk with Seagate and I couldn't be happier. Sorry but I told Western Digital numerous times in emails, Facebook posts, etc. that I will not pay their flood inflated prices. The flood that damaged their factories was long over and they didn't bring the prices down accordingly and so the heck with them. Right now I have two or three Seagate drives and they are all working properly. Oh and as for Western Digital I actually had a Black Caviar hard drive DOA and then had to replace the working drive I finally got not many years later. Oh and as for that company, Backblaze, it has been shown at times that their numbers can't be trusted and they also are running the drives harder than 99.9% of the average consumers would so whatever to their numbers.