External HDD--WD 4TB or Seagate 5TB

As a general rule, I take Amazon reviews with a grain of salt, most HDD manufacturers are about equal, and you only get a bump in reliability when you go from standard drives to NAS style drives (which you get on the WD EasyStore drives, but not on the small Passport drives).

At $100 for 4TB and $130 for 5TB, the 4TB WD seems the better value. And since you've had those drives in the past and liked them, stick with them. Or, better yet, get the second 5TB Seagate drive you linked for $110, which is a better value than both other drives.

I have had a seagate 2tb external click then fail on me after 3-4? years, then again, it was 4 years and that was over 10 years ago. I've switched over to Toshiba's externals and they have been good for 5+ years so far. I do not have experience with WD's externals however their internal WD black is top notch for over 7 years. The Toshiba 4tb I have was on Amazon Prime day sale for $99 CAD( too bad I already bought it half a year before!). If I had to pick, I'd choose WD over Seagate easily, Seagate runs a bit hot imo, I also did consider that WD external once but stuck with the Toshiba I knew.

If this is for home use, I would get a NAS.

If you're storing anything important/irreplaceable, also back it up online.

I recommend Seagate. Not because it's bigger, but because I always used Seagate and they always was good. One of my Seagate external backup device already works for 10 years.

I personally avoid Seagate any chance I get. I used to work for a callcenter at a tech with over 1500 PCs. Anytime I'd have a PC crash and need a new drive, 95% of the time it was a Seagate drive. I've had three Seagate drives over the last couple years also fail on me at home. I just don't trust them anymore. WD or Toshiba drives have been good to me.

You should check out the hard drive reports from backblaze. Seagate tend to be marginally worse than other brands.
I believe the reports are for internal hard drives only, but you can gauge the brand quality from them.
Latest report: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2019/

I have WD external drives which still work after having bought them over 10 years ago. But I've also had a WD internal drive die on me after 3 years. Personally, I'd go for the best GB/$ value.

MyPassport. Backup Plus is more suited for occasional writes and low reads (typical backup). MyPassport is more towards everyday use and semi-constant read/write operations. Seagate also has a line like that, they call it Expansion (or Extension?).
Funny enough, there are high-usage and high-reliability drives from Seagate, but they do not sell them themselves, they are always under some other brand.

I found the cheapest GB/price value also to be the most reliable one: Intenso Memory Center, they're big, they look outdated, they use an external power plug and they're not very fast for USB3 devices either, but they're cheap and reliable. I've had more than one usb powered disk just die on me, because they somehow got an overvoltage from the usb-port. Memory Center comes in 2-5 TB variants. I have two. They're ideal for a mass storage grave.

Only one word.
I have no good memories of Seagate.
Please do not ask for details.((-Θ-｡≡｡-Θ-))

Omg!Suddenly the whole image of the treasured cucumber image suddenly became unreadable! Let's die!

I've had WD Passports and they have never failed me (fingers crossed). Some I've had for more than a couple of years.
Seagate, I've had to return twice. Could be just sh*t luck but nevertheless...

currently i'm using wd red (2TB + 4TB internal) and so far i'm happy with them.
before i had two seagate barracuda 2TB. one died just 3 months ago aged 6 years and the other died 2 years ago already aged 4 years. i'm not too impressed by that. i got both seagates at the same time and decided at random which files go where. one was for my steam games, one for music, movies, photos, documents etc.
the one that died 2 years ago had the steam games on it. not great but not too bad. however at that time i didn't have a working backup of the music & documents drive so if i had picked the other drive when i installed them i would have lost tons of photos, documents and my 30+ years mp3 collection.

so i won't be buying seagate drives any time soon.

fun fact: i still have one wd raptor 74gb drive in my system with some obsolete windows xp installation.
that thing has almost 70 000 power on hours and still runs like on its first day.

I think I've only owned 2 Seagate drives but I had bad luck with both. They both died shortly after the warranty period expired which pissed me the hell off. One of them started failing a month after I bought it and I had to RMA it. I didn't want to try a 3rd time so I avoid Seagates. But some people feel the same way about WD so who knows.

This popular youtuber pc repairman has an opinion about Seagates

I guess reliability will be basically the same - there can be malfunctions for both (all) with a very low chance.

We have one for 5 years running 24/7. I think that's six of one and half a dozen of another - which company you choose. I prefer AC for an integrated fan, because of long running times. USB only definitely more practical for carrying it around.

Choose the specs you prefer / for what purpose, if you carry/drive it around more, a more stable one could be better but also normaly nothing happens, normally.

What might be worth considering is one with a internal backup. If for the low chance something goes sour you have a second internal copy.
Guess that's a $$$x2 issue, business wise it's a must have and depending on what data and where else it is stored something to think about.

Never seagate, never

I once had a WD My Passport, it fell while it runs from a height of 50cm, it's dead, I never buy a WD again.

I have 4x 3TB HDD joined into RAID5 matrix. (8TB space for user).
Already I had a situation where one of them died (replaced with a new one - old was replaced in guarantee services).
So keep in mind that any drive can die - no matter is SSD or HDD.
You can still lose your files.

seagate didnt dissapoint me the past years but i only used 1/2TB ones :P
only my ssds die constantly :c xD

Check this
I found it recently. I hope i helps.

As owner of 7 seagate at 3tb DO NOT BUY seagate. it's not worth it. Smaller seagate hdd's are somekind better but 3tb+ have extremely high ratio to die fast. 6 of my hdd died in 1-3 years. only 1 is wtihout issues because i don't use it:). Never seagate again...

Hard to believe that such HDDs are so "cheap" out there. Here they would cost over $1000 in my local currency. Just bumping for envy