Well, I'm no DR professional, I don't have the experience some of the “gurus” here have, but, as I said, you can't predict anything at all for one particular unit : it could last 10 years with sustained use (some here might disagree, they may be right – but how many HDDs last 10 years nowadays, regardless of the brand / model ?), it could fail in two months with a moderate use, and you could say the same for any other model from any other brand. Even if statistically HGST drives were less likely to fail (I don't know, maybe it's true), some of them do fail anyway, and the fact that, on average, Seagate drives supposedly have a worse potential outcome for data recovery when they fail (this is probably true as I've read it repeatedly here from different contributors who definitely seem to know what they're talking about and would have no reason for unanimously spreading false information – unless this forum is in fact a sect and they are actual gurus !
) should be a moot point, if you have a proper backup of everything remotely important that is stored on it, regularly updated and verified.
Now that you have purchased this one, since you are careful enough to thoroughly check if it's reliable, and will check regularly the SMART data (HD Sentinel is excellent for that purpose as it does a constant verification in the background and warns you right away in case there's something wonky), since it's currently perfectly operational, I don't see a valid reason to re-sell it and replace it. If anything, knowing about that brand's bad reputation among DR professionals should make you all the more careful with it, whereas, if you did replace it with a HGST one as it has been advised, you may feel a little
too safe and not care as much, then if it did fail you wouldn't be prepared (a bit like having a small and frail car makes you drive more carefully and be less prone to severe accidents than driving a big heavy car which
feels perfectly safe even at full speed, but can still crush you inside if it ends up smashing against something bigger and heavier).
Or, another perspective : your portable hard disk drive could be lost / stolen – then, however reliable or unreliable the thing was on a technical level, you would instantly lose everything that was on it with no chance of recovery.
“We gotta make the best of it. Improvise. Adapt to the environment. Darwin. Shit happens.
I Ching. Whatever. We got to roll with it.”
Collateral (2004)