For external drives, I would seriously consider using SSDs. Unless you use them exclusively as cold backups and handle them carefully and seldom, I would be far

For external drives, I would seriously consider using SSDs. Unless you use them exclusively as cold backups and handle them carefully and seldom, I would be far too worried about accidental drops. I have killed some external HDDs this way, never killed an SSD, even though I am far rougher with them. For extra reliability, buy two disks from different manufacturers (e.g. Sandisk/WD and Samsung) at different times and mirror the contents. Less chance of both disks going bad at the same time. Talking about 3.5" HDDs, sourced from external drives: WD is still ok in my book. Both the Backblaze report [1] (newest, quarterly version, check the drive hours, WDC has less than HGST so far) and my own experience show they are ok. I used to buy HGST based on Backblaze's reports, but now I am using WD external drives in my NAS. My oldest and most used disk (one of the parity drives) has more than 3 years power on hours with nearly 900 start/stop cycles. It shows no signs of failure so far. I get these HDDs from external drives (called "shucking"), 10TB WD My Book or WD Elements Desktop. It is a bit random what you get, but between 7 HDDs (+1 currently in testing) over about 3 years, I only had one non-Helium drive that runs hotter than the other all Helium drives. No failures yet, no bit errors as well, performance is at least good enough for media storage, currently reading at about 180MB/s sequentially. I saw one problem: USB errors with WD's USB-SATA bridge and I even had to remove the newest disk to run the test, it would drop from the bus via USB. Might be because it is a refurbished disk or something fishy with the USB 3.0 ports on my server, so I won't blame WD for it. [1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2023/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-...