Technically you can mix & match as long as they are of the same capacity. Some NAS appliances might not like that tho. But a way around what you mention, keepi

Technically you can mix & match as long as they are of the same capacity. Some NAS appliances might not like that tho. But a way around what you mention, keeping it to a single manufacturer: is to buy the drives from different retailers, hopefully geographically dispersed, a few weeks apart, to ensure you get drives from different manufacturing batches. Unless there's a systemic issue with the entire product line (unlikely to go unnoticed) you spread out the risk of a single bad batch that way. Maybe overkill, but that's what I did many years ago.