Do I understand correctly; you do not like Western Digital hd’s? I have several externals. What brand do you prefer? And why?
I used to work for the Ohio BWC. My department maintained about 4000 systems with WD HDs, and we ended up replacing almost 1/4 of them due to failure, click of death, ect.
That was back when a 200Mb HD was considered big, but I haven't had much use for Western Digital since then.
Until recently, Seagate gave a 5 year warranty. Now you gotta buy their more expensive drives for the 5 year, and most are 3 year, but they still blow the competition out of the water, and last a long time.