Anecdotal plug, I have had the best luck with Toshiba drives. In my current NAS I am using seagate 12tb recert ironwolf drives but that only has a month of uptime so far.

Before those I ran Toshiba 4tb NAS drives, and before that Toshiba 2tb red drives for 8years with no issues and 100% uptime in a drivepool windows setup. My last couple of backup drives were 6th WD drives and I am 2 for 2 on premature drive failures with those.

I also refuse to run WD online type devices since the mybooklive/mycloud security issues that resulted in significant data loss and WD refused to patch it. Instead they gave pile a $50 credit for a new drive

I am currently getting a replacement for my old win10+drivepool setup using hand me down parts from my old main pc. I decided to go with UNRAID this time and other than a few headaches, its been pretty simple to get going. I am already a big fan of the container/docker/app setup. My setup is 3 12tb seagate iron wolf nas drives recertified/refurbished from ebay, the nvme ssd I used as my prior boot drive as a cache drive, and a r7 1700 and ab350m pro 4 mobo with a pny xlr8 1070gpu. It was mostly free since I was replacing it with a newer gaming build. I think I spent $280 on the hdds?

Tagging along on this question, is there a reasonably simple way to rip audible books to a non-proprietary/drm format?