Do keep in mind that HGST *IS* Western Digital – and got bought out almost a decade ago.
As part of the regulatory requirements for WD to buy Toshiba, Toshiba got some technology (appears to have included HeliSeal) so they could “be more competative” and at least one drive factory.
WD got a flood-damaged factory from Toshiba in Thailand.
There was also a requirement that WD operate HGST as a separate company, lasted 2-3 years but has long since been waived.

BTW – Seagate was even MORE famed for selling SMR drives and not telling folks they were SMR – not the Archive 8TB, those were well known to be SMR – but some of their later drive models in the Exos line.
WD was at least always putting “SMR” in their drive data sheets SOMEWHERE – Seagate skipped that option a couple times.
And WD was VERY up front on their current 26TB offering being SMR.

I think Seagate and WD are the worst offenders for this, especially with the issues with the SG3TB Drives and WD’s changing of CMR to SMR for certain Drives.

HGST and Toshiba have a rather good reputation overall in the consumer market, with failures being rare.

WD seems to have learned a lot about quality from HGST in the time they owned them but had to “operate” them separately due to Chinese government issues.
The SMR mess was sad, but the actual quality of the drives is very good overall.

Seagate has a very long pattern.
Their factories with the best QC get used to supply OEMs like Dell, HP, and such, as those OEMs are almost certain to “return” drives for refund/credit.
Then the “left over” production of those factories, and the output of the OTHER factories, are what are used to supply the “retail” sales channel – as a lot of THOSE drives do not get returned due to the “hassle” of dealing with the the whole issue by an individual on one drive.

I’ve not noticed this same pattern out of WD/HGST or Toshiba.

I have a hunch low Power Cycle Count helps longevity because less temperature cycles.

Other drives are newer, we will see. About 10 WD 10/12TB externals, maybe 6 SMR 8TB Seagate externals. Then a bunch of Exos 16TBs they seem very well designed and run cool it’ll be interesting with the Helium after 10 years…

I have 2 PCs whose system drive are 250GB WD Enterprise Drives WD2502ABYS with 90K hours, perfect SMART. 24/7 as Distributed Computing PCs

1 PC with a WD10002FBYS 1TB with 98.1K hours 24/7 Distributed Computing. Perfect SMART.

Yes, majority of my drives have relatively low Power Cycle count. I believe that helps. Temperature variation causes stress perhaps moreso than just steadystate on all the time. Fluidic bearings last forever? Lubrication of read/write heads servo arms causes no wear no matter how many billions of accesses?

About bad sectors.. they don’t necessarily go exponential. I have a 24/7 torrent seeder PC with a 4TB Hitachi HUS724040ALE640 , random reads very heavily nearly constantly and the drive is nearly full. When I set it up, bad sectors were rising and preemptively cloned the drive to swap when it fails. But, for months now it has stayed at 24 reallocated. About 75K hours.

Also, 2.5″ Samsung Spinpoint M9T 2TB 55K hours, 24/7 storage drive has had some heavy use, perfect SMART