Recommendations?

If you have a Nas... install plex or jellyfin and you can still let them "borrow" it all the same...

Far from a "downside".

If they were cheaper I'd use them for archival purposes. They work well as cold storage.

Every drive I've had fail, personally or professionally, has been a Seagate drive.

Seagate does seem to have a higher failure rate, but they are also cheaper. From this article:

The oldest (average age of 92.5 months) hard drive Backblaze tested was a 6TB Seagate (ST6000DX000). Its AFR was 0.11 percent in 2021 and 0.68 percent in 2022. Backblaze said this was "a very respectable number any time, but especially after nearly eight years."

...

"In general, Seagate drives are less expensive and their failure rates are typically higher in our environment," Backblaze said. "But, their failure rates are typically not high enough to make them less cost-effective over their lifetime. You could make a good case that for us, many Seagate drive models are just as cost-effective as more expensive drives."

Their oldest drives are Seagate as well, so that's saying something.

Whether a drive will be reliable for you is less related to the manufacturer and more related to capacity and luck.

Here's an anecdote from Reddit:

I've had numerous hard drive failures over the years -- nothing atypical, I just use lots of drives, and like almost everything else, they have stochastic failures. But between Seagate and WD, the Seagate drives all at least let me know they were going to fail soon, via SMART monitoring, and gave me (just) ample time to get all of my data off of them before completely dying. My WD drives that failed did so instantaneously, without any prior indication of problems.

But this could also be luck, idk. My takeaway is:

• Seagate has a little higher failure rate, which explains why they're often cheaper
• Seagate may do a good job detecting errors with SMART
• all drives fail and whether one will fail before another is more likely up to luck than any systemic issue by a manufacturer

I genuinely don't know. Their name was just the first one that came to my mind.