I don’t got much consumer experience regarding the different types of drives and options as I’ve been using only Seagate Portable External Hard Drives for several years while buying a new one annually to start another backup in case of anything. So far, none of them had failed me yet, but I worry that one day it’ll inevitably happen and won’t be ready when that time comes to have things backed up accordingly. I don’t heavily keep any of my external HDDs plugged into my computer for any longer than it should be since it’s for archiving old content and only connecting them to transfer or add more into the drive.
Any recommendations or suggestions on HDD brands I should go for instead to branch away from Seagate and better my chances or finally switch towards SSD? Highest storage size I’ve gotten is around 4TB while hoping to get the right one in time for Black Friday/Cyber Monday for an upgrade as well on getting a storage increase as a bonus.
Your best bet is to have multiple copies and validate your data regularly. Doesn’t really matter what you store it on.
In case of HDD, you have 3 brands to work with Seagate, WD and Toshiba, they are all fine in terms of reliability, you need to look for the best $/TB ratio and warranty time. To keep your data safe, I would rather think to implement 3-2-1 backup rule. https://www.veeam.com/blog/321-backup-rule.html