A guy I know who works as a computer tech swears by Seagate. He says they have fewer internal parts, so fewer things can go wrong. I've had good luck with them myself over the years. You will get contrary opinions over the net, however.

As jdack said, you can't really predict which ones are going to fail beforehand. The only thing you can do is keep multiple backups of your important data. ANY drive will fail eventually.