All my HGSTs had About 23k - 25k/ hours or less on them. I bought 10 14tb EXOS that had just about 1000 hours. I am sure someones startup went tits up.
I don’t believe I’ve ever had one HGST drive fail.I still have a very old SATA 2 single TB from back when they were still Hitachi. I run it still, as a backup for my kid’s PC. Mainly just to see when the thing will die. But it may outlive me.
All my stuff is HGST now, everything else died and i noticed they did not. I bought a few direct but most were from a lot of drive shucking that I did, from before I got into decom enterprise storage and was still stringing sata cables. WD had HGST white label drives wrapped in their plastic.
That’s really why I don’t use SAS: when I was first buying drives, I didn’t know much about them. I do have five 8TB data center pulls from ebay that are HGST SAS, set aside for my first ZFS adventure. Soon. Maybe I will love them too.
I never had anything like an Exos from Toshiba but I did have four of their 6Tb, two were called “Gold” as I recall. Best of their consumer grade crap at the time, but still consumer grade crap. Every single one died a few months before the warranty was up. They fought me on the claims for three for no valid reason, and in the end I got a small prorated refund. They refused to replace. I didn't even bother filing for the fourth drive when it died too, it wasn't worth it. I’ll never buy a Toshiba drive again though. Hope you have better luck with them.