Funny because I have a box of Seagate consumer drives recovered from systems going to recycling that just won’t quit. And my experience with WD drives is the same as your experience with Seagate.
Edit: now that I think about it, my WD experience is from many years ago. But the Seagate drives I have are not new either.
Ah I wasn’t thinking about that. I got the scrappy spinny bois.
I’m fairly sure me and my friends had a bad batch of Western digitals too.