I read an article on the web a year or so ago that gave the relative reliability of different brands of hard drive. Luck enters into it a bit, but I recall Lacie scored very well, and Maxtor didn't.
LaCie don't make their own hard drives.
Also, beware that there's been a lot of consolidation in the HDD market in recent years, so for instance a report that says Seagate are rubbish and Hitachi are great would have been kyboshed by Hitachi buying IBM's drives division (from which the DeskStar drives got the warranted moniker "DeathStar"). etc.