And I’ve only ever had WD hard drives and sandisk flash drives die on me

Maybe it's confirmation bias but almost all memory that failed on me has been sandisk-flash storage. Zhe only exception being a corsair ssd which failed after 3 yrs as the main laptop drive + another 3 as a server boot and log-drive.

but not every manufacturer has had class action lawsuits filed against their continued shitty products.

Wait.. fake? I just bought some of those.

If you're relying on one hard drive not failing to preserve your data you are doing it wrong from the jump. I've got about a dozen hard drives in play from seagate and WD at any given time (mostly seagate because they're cheaper and I don't need speed either) and haven't had a failure yet. Backblaze used to publish stats about the hard drives they use, not sure if they still do but that would give you some data to go off. Seagate did put out some duds a while back but other models are fine.

Hard drives aren't great for archival in general, but any modern drive should work. Grab multiple brands and make at least two copies. Look for sales. Externals regularly go below $15/tb these days.

My WD Red Pros have almost all lasted me 7+ years but the best thing (and probably cheapest nowadays) is a proper 3-2-1 backup plan.

I think refurbished enterprise drives usually have a lot of extra protection hardware that helps them last a very long time. Seagate advertises a mean time to failure on their exos drives of ~200 years with a moderate level of usage. I feel like it would almost always be a better choice to get more refurbished enterprise drives than fewer new consumer drives.

I personally found an 8tb exos on serverpartdeals for ~$100 which seems to be in very good condition after checking the SMART monitoring. I'm just using it as a backup so there isn't any data on it that isn't also somewhere else, so I didn't bother with redundancy.

I'm not an expert, but this is just from the research I did before buying that backup drive.

In my case, 10+years ago I had 6 * 3tb Seagate disks in a software raid 5. Two of them failed and it took me days to force it back into the raid and get some of the data off. Now I use WD and raid 6.

I read 3 or 4 years ago that it was just the 3tb reds I used had a high failure rate but I'm still only buying WDs

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/whats-behind-the-infamous-seagate-bsy-bug/

this thread has multiple documented instances of poor QA and firmware bugs Seagate has implemented at the cost of their own customers.

my specific issue was even longer ago, 20+ years. there was a bug in the firmware where there was a buffer overflow from an int limit on runtime. it caused a cascade failure in the firmware and caused the drive to lock up after it ran for the maximum into limit. this is my understanding of it anyway.

the only solution was to purchase a board online for the exact model of your HDD and swap it and perform a firmware flash before time ran out. I think you could also use a clip and force program the firmware.

at the time a new board cost as much as a new drive, finances of which I didn't have at the time.

eventually I moved past the 1tb of data I lost, but I will never willingly purchase another Seagate.