Now that's just plain weird to me! Mine all die from "media errors" (bad sectors). They're fine, fine, fine, then one bad sector, then lots more within days. That's the usual pattern for a particle landing on the platters and then getting pushed around by the heads.

My usage situation probably does differ a lot from many others here, so drives that fail for me quite regularly may be fine for others with different usages.

Here, nothing stays spun up for more than a few hours at best. Most of the time my mechanical drives are powered off. They only get powered on and spun up when needed, perhaps once every couple of days. I guess the Seagate 8TB drives don't like that very much, despite the load/unload cycle count not being terribly high when they do die. Perhaps the spin up/down is dislodging some dust/particles or something that then kills them.

The WDC drives here thus far don't seem to suffer from that -- I really only ever replace them when I need higher capacity. I think I had one 3TB WDC die on me, but the rest have been fine for quite some time now. Maybe this on/off reliability comes from WDC's long history with external USB drives?

My 24/7 drives are all SSDs by Crucial/Micron. Most of our other SSDs are also by Crucial.

I have recently run across a completely dead (not showing on SATA bus) Mushkin 480GB SSD (w/Sandforce controller), and a dead Kingston V200 128GB SSD. Noteworthy for me, because dead SSDs are a very rare event around here. Both of those were older than the failed Seagate drives.

The Sandforce-based Mushkin would be recoverable if I had a factory firmware image for it (I don't), as shorting the internal jumper does bring it back to life in "manufacturing mode".

The Kingston V200 failed in a particularly nice way. No idea what its problem was, but it simply set itself to read-only and just accepts but ignores any attempts to write or erase it. The data on it was fully recoverable by simply mounting/reading it.