Thing about Seagate drives though is that they're usually less expensive than the competition. From my perspective, they do not have a high enough failure rate

Thing about Seagate drives though is that they're usually less expensive than the competition. From my perspective, they do not have a high enough failure rate to justify spending extra on a brand like HGST. If you're doing things right, you have both redundancy and backups for your critical stuff, and in my experience Seagate is good about replacing failed drives within the warranty period. Anecdotally, the only Seagate disks that have caused me significant headache are the Archive line that definitely uses SMR and is marketed appropriately because of it.