In my old system I had a failing PSU. I thought it was a motherboard issue and took a little while getting around to fixing it. At the time, I had 4 hard drives in use.. two WD drives, a seagate and a fujitsu. One of the WD was IDE, all others were SATA.
Now in the space of around 5 months I went through 8 hard drives with constant failures and corrupt sectors. One of them drives was the WD SATA, the other 7 were seagate and fujitsu.
Now I'm not saying because of this one time that WD are miles above the rest.. but from PERSONAL expirence, my (6+ year old) WD IDE drive is still working, and I've only had to replace one or two WD SATA drives, where as I went through so many other makes I stopped buying them all together.
Western Digital it seems are at least able to take random power spikes without fault or damaging.