Trick question. The answer is "don't". I can't find a direct citation for external HDDs being the lowest parts-bin of drives manufactured, but the pricing tells the story enough for me.
My data is valuable enough to me that I usually spend ~twice as much on a high-end drive and put it in my own enclosure. I usually go for IronWolf drives, and I'm a big fan of ICY BOX enclosures: https://icybox.de/en/product.php?id=297
The thing I greatly dislike about Ironwolf is that it displays a nonsense value for the smart attribute "Raw_Read_Error_Rate". I have no idea to how to extract the actual error rate, if any.
Seagate has used an odd encoded value for this for years. You're attempting to read a raw value, which is meant for Seagate's internal tools. This is all documented.
smartctl knows how to parse it, it just never does by default (a long-standing bug that isn't high priority enough to fix).
Do `smartctl -a -v 1,raw48:54 /dev/xxx`, or `-v 7,raw48:54` for raw seek.
However, these values have never been useful to diagnose a drive as failing before data corruption appears (and it gets kicked of a raid), in my experience.
Seagate. They have a bad reputation for reliability, but my experience is that it is overblown. Keep proper backups and use the warranty if it fails within that period. If it fails outside of it chances are there are even denser drives for less money on the market anyway.
Meanwhile, they're cheap and Seagate never pulled that SMR-in-NAS-disks shit that WD and a few others did.
This kind of thinking won't help you. There are three HDD vendors (and not many more SSD vendors) and they've all screwed their customers multiple times.
It sucks that there's no real alternative to meticulous research before any purchase, but that's how it is.
WD's recent weirdness with the Red drives has pushed me to just spend the extra money for SSDs. I've been happy with Samsung's high-end products but I'm sure there are caveats.
Toshiba and Seagate. Hitachi split into WD (aka HGST) and Toshiba.
This WD dumbassery seems like its mostly on the WD side. I'm not aware of any dumb decisions being made on the HGST-side of the WD company yet. It should also be noted that Sandisk is also owned by WD.
It's a sample size of one, but the worst recent HDD I bought was a Toshiba. I got it in, and within a week I was getting SMART warnings about a high number of reallocated sectors (accompanied by strange performance characteristics.
I RMA'd the drive and the replacement had the exact same issue.
Could be a sample size of one though. One of the most important things for hard drives is to keep them protected. If your shipping company screws up (see Amazon) and drops the box hard on your front porch, you may end up with a broken drive.
AKA: The issue could very well not be the hard drive manufacturer, but instead the company that delivered your hard drives to you. I prefer to pick up hard drives physically from Microcenter for this reason, it means that I can properly "baby" those fragile drives all the way home.
