[beepbeep]

I work with storage.

1:st, you cannot say "brand X is rubbish, brand Y is good". Every new series is unique. IBM Deathstars frequently crashed, but next series was good. Certain WD models were bad, others were good etc.

2:nd, only way to really survive single disk crash is to run some kind of RAID. RAID-5 is most common (big SATA discs in RAID-5 might get problematic while rebuilding due to error frequency vs. disk size but it's out of scope right now).

3:rd, real life data collected by Google on some 100k discs reveals that drives don't like it too cold either.

For home use, a small NAS box with three or four discs is good enough. There are plenty of models to choose from. I found Netgear NV+ or NVX to work fine. They can be used by multiple computers at once and will survive one dead disc.

And last: RAID is NOT a backup. It will not save your a$$ if you accidentally delete something or hardware takes a dump. If you value your data, have a off-line copy. (disc, tape or cloud, doesn't matter...just make sure you have fairly recent copy)