Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

SMR in those. Also typically 5200RPM vs 7200RPM speed.

From experience I can say you can’t reliably play back high bitrate content from those. Read and write speeds get bad after you’ve used 1/3-1/2 the drive. Oh 8MB/s should be fine. But forget playing a 4K encode at 20MB/s with a 2MB/s audio track.

As backup drives they’re acceptable as long as you can accept much longer write times to refresh data.

Bigger drives with power supplies generally are 7200RPM. Many of the lower capacity ones (under 14TB) are still SMR but you should be able to play back higher bitrate content and get a bit better read/write performance.

Please read up on CMR and SMR technology. All these backup HDDs in external enclosures are inferior SMR HDDs and really terrible for most uses but the occasional backup of small chunks of data. As soon as you write larger chunks of data at once to SMR drives they slow down to a crawl.

CMR drives are sold as Seagate Ironwolf, WD Red, etc.

I would avoid an external or at least ensure the hdd inside it pinned to a normal conector.

I certainly lost data on one going bad and had no easy way of extracting data off of it due to having some soldered proprietary connection.

I havent seen inside a MyPassport but the MyBook is just a standard 3.5" SATA drive with a USB controller attached. For the smaller form factor, I'd imagine they're more integrated and not able to be shucked which means it could, in theory, be less reliable if the control board broke, but this is just speculation and the odds of that happening are probably pretty low.

Not really. Any drive used for external USB is probably binned for that, meaning it may not have passed enough quality checks for higher-durability internal use.

i would avoid smaller wd external hdds, the big ones or seagate ones have sata hdd inside, but those wd ones are usb-only. you get to trash the drive if the converter fails (which is pretty common)

also consider getting larger enterprise 2nd hand drives, those are pretty cheap and nice

Piggybacking to ask if anyone knows of any external HDD that is SATA internally so I can take it apart and shove it into my system. The price difference is insane right now

I don't think the durability of data is affected in your examples. All of my external USB disks are kinda old but they run on type-B; the ones with additional power will probably have a faster spin. If running on USB type-C then that may not be an issue either.