IMHO: Just don't buy any kind of packaged External Hard drive.
Seagate, IMHO is a notorious offender: I've had more of these fail than any other type of drive I've purchased.
All drive companies short externals, short them on what? Technically they short them on everything. Externals cost about the same as an internal drive, yet require more parts, they do this by shaving cost elsewhere. Is Seagate worse, well they are more prone to damage from vibration but for the most part drive reliability often comes down to the batch and who you ask. I've had good and bad luck with all of them.
So how important is the batch?
When you setup a server you specifically try and use drives from multiple batches to make sure they don't all fail at the same time.
Other important tips...
Don't leave it plugged in.
When you unplug it, unplug the end OPPOSITE the drive and wait for it to stop spinning before you move or disconnect the cable at the drive end.
Use it at least once every few weeks, and make sure it gets warm. This ensures the lube does what it should rather than dry up in a place it's doing nothing.
Do this and they should last a very long time.
DO keep an eye on Blaze's hard drive failure reports (great for 3.5" drives) and buy one of the models that has a very low failure rate.:
https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html
Backblaze's duty cycle is not the same as your duty cycle and therefore it's completely useless.
Backblaze loads 50+ drives into a chassis, these all create massive amount of vibration, something non-enterprise drives are not rated for, simply put, this is serious abuse of these drives. Worse still, these drives are then spun up, written with data, then they sit there spinning idle for the rest of their life. They almost never read, they only write and once full they rarely get used again. Does this sound anything like how your drive is treated? No. Enterprise drives specifically list how many drives can be in a single chassis because the vibration is such an issue. Believe it or not, typing or even loud noise can impact your drives. It's not just a fall that causes problems for it.
So again, don't pay any attention to Backblaze drive reports they're worthless to anyone but Backblaze and they really shouldn't even report them. They do do because it causes people to constantly quote them in threads like this giving them free advertising.
The better drive report to read was a Google report years ago where they determined uncorrected and pending sector counts were the best way to predict failure and vibration was the biggest drive killer on their workstations.
But it seems to me that the best 2.5 inch drives to get are WD Blacks. EVERY 2.5" SEAGATE I've ever had has failed in 6months (I have only ever bought four Seagate 2.5 inch drives, however).
WD Blacks, initially were little more than a low end enterprise grade drive for consumers.
I believe they've lowered that quality a bit since but they are still very much built to a better standard and are pretty much the only spinner I even like to use these days because they're just that much better. This is typical for lots of things in computers, enterprise laptops tend to survive a lot better as well.
