Problem of Toshiba is the very bad warranty for 3.5" drives, at least in Europe. To me, considering that any drive can fail at any time, the quality and convenience of warranty is of utmost importance when purchasing a brand new HDD, even more important than the brand's reputation of reliability. A few years ago I purchased a 2TB 3.5" Toshiba HDD, it failed after only a few months. That alone is not enough to advise against this brand, I'm aware that, statistically, it can happen. But when gathering information to obtain a replacement unit, I discovered that Toshiba did not propose a direct RMA service for internal 3.5" drives, I had to deal with the reseller. In this case, the reseller's policy was to grant a credit of the same amount, to be used only at its online shop. And I was lucky because a few weeks after I purchased a replacement unit (probably a Seagate), said online shop disappeared – had it happened then I would have been S.O.L., even though the unit would have been still officially under warranty.
For that reason I prefer Western Digital, since it's the only brand, as far as I know, which proposes an advanced RMA service – they ship a new drive first, and then the client has a month to return the defective unit. (Only problem is that the replacement units are “recertified”, meaning, drives which were returned as defective and have been repaired / tested in factory, such drives probably have a higher failure rate than brand new ones. As a matter of fact, I once requested a RMA for a 1.5TB WD HDD, received a “recertified” replacement unit, which in turn started to misbehave soon thereafter, so I had to request yet another replacement unit... But this one is still working.)
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That said, all HDDs fail sooner or later, but these which i have just mentioned are usually more durable and when they fail it usually happens in a less catastrophic way.
I'm wary of that kind of blanket statements, as it may be statistically true, but it says nothing about what will happen to a particular unit in a particular setting (some drives may be more sensitive to high temperatures, others to vibrations, some may be fragilized by constant use, others by frequent start/stop cycles...). Seagate drives have a horrendous reputation on this forum,
I've had three which failed but each time I was able to recover everything (or close to everything) that wasn't backed up. The aforementioned Toshiba drive failed gradually but shortly after purchase; I could recover most of the data but some files were corrupted. I've had a
WD drive which failed all of a sudden (most likely head failure), and
a 2.5" Hitachi which failed all of a sudden (most likely a PCB failure). So pretty much anything can happen.