I've seen good drives and bad drives from everyone, except seagate.
I have actually never had a single seagate drive fail on me ever.
We once bought 8 Seagate SCSI drives for a customer. They were installed in the
equipment, fully tested for a few days and the power went off for half a year.
Fully untouched or unmoved we powered them on and 6 of the 8 had "glued heads".
The disk spindles didn't start spinning at all. Out of the equipment after a
firm manual tangential "knock" all six did "start again" but we presumed them to
be total-loss.
Development, test and production cycles are so short in the disk drive industry
that it's a true statistical gamble to state error rates and lifetime. Any
unknow structural defect or unknown behavior of 100+ parts and all their
specific interactions(!), can destroy all theory and statistics.
The over-all statistics for all producers in this industry are exceptionally
good compared to many many other producers in this world.
I have seen quite some disks and believe you should power them up and keep them
spinning for their lifetime.