2nd Dead Harddrive... Who's to blame, Apple, or Seagate?

Question

When I got my Macbook, I elected to upgrade the hard drive myself, so I purchased a Seagate Momentus 120gig drive, which is from the same series of drives that the drive my MacBook shipped with is from.
Well my drive just died a second time. It refuses to mount and just clicks. It was just replaced via Seagate's warranty a year ago. I'm frankly very upset because this time around I lost a lot of valuable data. Seagate's warranty of course doesn't cover data and when I checked with Seagate's Data Recovery service they quoted me something along the lines of $1,800 which I could never hope to afford. I tried talking to their customer service with hopes that they would be nice and give me a discount since this is the second time their drive has failed me, but they pretty much said "***** to be you" (though they used more formal language.)
I was reading about clicking drives and how to fix them and one solution said you could freeze it when hopes of having enough time to get the data off of it. Apparently the freezing helps because it contracts the parts inside.
This made me wonder, did the drive die because Seagate made a faulty product, or did it die because the MacBook gets too hot?
Has anyone else had issues with Seagate drives in their MacBooks, especially higher capacity models?

Answer 1

I've just been hit by the same MacBook/Seagate time-bomb, as have apparently countless others. Well, not exactly countless...
When my original Seagate drive failed after about 6 months there was enough unbacked-up business data on it that it was worth paying to recover. So ok, I overnight the drive and the next day the cleanroom folks call to tell me that it's a complete goner with the same problem (rotational scratching all across all platters) as they've seen on between 500 and 600 drives on this same Seagate class in different capacities. Now, there are say 20 restoration outfits around the world about as large as the one I picked, so it's easy to feel that at least 10,000 such failed drives have passed through their collective labs. But wait, only about 1 in 10 failures (probably fewer) are worth the USD 1000 or so for recovery, so now we're looking at 100,000 failures, conservatively, in the last 6 months or so.
This is very much like the Firestone Tire / Ford Explorer fiasco that killed a bunch of people, not just HDD's. Were the tire-failure-induced rollovers Firestone's fault because it made the tires, or were they Ford's fault for recommending the tires be slightly underinflated (and so ran hotter and the sidewalls more) for better handling? The real point was that it was kept a SECRET by both of them while people died.
So, maybe it's Seagate's fault, because I've read the problem has happened elsewhere, not just in Macs. Or maybe it's Apple because the environment might be too hot (same as the non-Mac failures?) but we don't know. In any case, it is **** near criminal to keep an epidemic of this size a SECRET. I got no notification from Apple that these drives were subject to a mean time before failure of about 4-6 months. And of course Seagate didn't mention it publicly either, as far as I can tell.
I WILL NEVER BUY ANOTHER SEAGATE DRIVE. (And I've been buying drives since 1984).
Apple, I thought I knew thee. But now you've created a whole different kind of memory. You've killed Kenny.