It's a wash. Modern mechanical HDDs are so reliable that the vendor basically doesn't matter. Especially if you stick with 'Enterprise'-tier drives (preferably

It's a wash. Modern mechanical HDDs are so reliable that the vendor basically doesn't matter. Especially if you stick with 'Enterprise'-tier drives (preferably with a SAS interface), you should be good. Aside from some mishaps (that don't necessarily impact reliability) with vendors failing to disclose the HAMR nature of some consumer HDDs, I don't think there have been any truly disastrous series in the past 10-15 years or so. You're more likely to get bitten by supply-chain substitutions (and get used drives instead of new ones) these days, even though that won't necessarily lead to data loss.