I've gone to SSDs for my Macs and Image backups, but for storage it's still quite economical to do spinning drives.
With that in mind, it's always good to know what is good and what is not.
Backblaze, an iCloud storage backup service, has a lot of drives and does quarterly reviews of them now (used to be annual, but they must be growing)
I love seeing that my prejudice against Seagate is warranted, and to learn what seems to hold up. They are moving up away from 3TB and 4TB up to 10TB and 12TB, so you can see whats coming down your pipeline one day!
Here is their review:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-driv…-rates-q3-2017/
And a link there goes to a person doing a more in-depth review, analyzing the date through a medical statistical lens (I always like to throw a big of geekiness Ingolf's way, haha):
https://hackernoon.com/applying-medic…ts-36227cfd5372
Anecdotally, over 70% of my Seagate drives have failed within 2 years since buying them around 2005. Western Digital has been pretty solid, failing after many years of use. I've not had a Hitachi or Toshiba go. All my SSD's so far are in working order (Cruze and OWC)
I'm thinking after reading this report of getting an HGST Deskstar 4TB off Amazon. The issue with 3TB and up is that in the past I've had to format them differently to work on Windows. IDK if the new windows OS's (8 and up) are picky that way. But I usually format them NTSF and use Paragon to read them on my Macs. If anyone has better ways of doing this, please chime in. I'm out of the IT loop these days.