Then some point later, there was a good deal on Seagate HDs, and I bought another one.
Also crashed "early" in its life.
I never buy them again. The main PC building forum I used to frequent also have a pinned topic announcing that they've lost all hope with Seagate and will never recommend it for anyone asking for help on a build. That was 10 years ago, and last I checked they still stuck to that policy.
Don't buy Seagate.
Guess who had two of these fail almost at the same time in his NAS a couple of years back.
Seagate's 10. and 11. lines were notorious for going bad. I have stacks of bad Seagate drives from those days (2010s, iirc). For 3.5 inch form factor models, Seagate drives were dying at a rate of 10x all other brands combined.
The earliest HDD scandal I recall was when Seagate bough Conner, just as Conner's run of leaky-seals started eating platters. Seagate refused to honor those warranties for years. Something eventually changed. IDK what, I always assumed a court was involved.
For non-Seagate drives: I did have a bunch of 500GB WD Blue SSDs die a couple of years back. I replaced some under warranty; I later found a firmware update restored the rest of them.