Eric is correct, none of the manufacturers seem to stand out when it comes to longevity of their hard drives. Most of them seem to fail at some point. However, sometimes you get lucky, and have a hard drive that gives you a really long life.
As it is, it's important to keep it cool. Heat seems to shorten the lifespan of a hard drive. And External hard drives are probably terrible at this part, as a lot of them really get hot.
I run a file-server, put my hard drives in there, and put it in a out-of-the-way spot. And use RAID so if one drive fails, I can just replace it and not worry about losing all of my data.
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