If there is one company that could give accurate stats on what drives actually perform better and what drives are the worst and fail more often it is Black Blaze, but yet they don't. What a missed opportunity to provide some insight.
My bad!!
For my personal NAS projects, I generally buy a WD MyBook/EasyStore from Best Buy and shuck the drive. The drive on the inside is generally a WD White Label, which is a WD Red (NAS drive) that didn't meet QA specs. I wouldn't rely on them for mission critical stuff, but they're perfect for a Plex server and you can generally get them cheap. (worth noting that I've seen a few say they've been removing the SATA connections from these recently and I haven't bought one in about 15 months so do some research before purchasing)