After all this news of false advertisement and lower quality drives from WD, I'm glad I bought Seagate drives, even if only because Amazon had a big fat discount on Barracudas the day I was shopping for some spinning rust.
There's an order or two of magnitude less data and benchmarks on the Toshiba drives, but I just bought Toshiba 6x6TBs for a NAS build because I couldn't stomach buying WD or Seagate (or HGST which is just WD now).
EDIT: Forgot to say, the drives have been great. It's only been 6 months or so, but they've been performant, no bad sectors yet.
https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/16/toshiba-desktop-disk-d...
The only way to get good hard drives these days is to buy from the enterprise lines e.g. WD Gold or Seagate Exos. They're extremely expensive, but this is the only way to get the kind of quality that used to be standard a few years ago.
It's reasonable to expect companies to honour their spec sheets, and to not lie in their firmware.
Once they're caught doing otherwise it's important to hold them accountable, not throw our hands up and pay up anyway.
However, the difference was not in just branding which to me was surprising. In Elements the drive is held by rubber brackets which won’t fit in non-WD drives, but Easystore is using rubberized screws, which allowed me to use the case with older Seagates.
They do run hot in the external case. I was trying to run badblocks and when the temp became about 60C, I decided to run an external fan. I wonder how long do these drives last in these external cases.. In my NAS with fans, the highest it got was 49C
Some WD external drives will hang the boot process if the host computer probes the drive for bootability. These drives will even stop the host computer from booting if they're connected via USB, much less if they're directly connected.
Some USB external drives have the USB controller embedded on the drive PCB and don't provide an accessible SATA interface.
As of writing this comment, big external drives still come with 3.5" hard drives, with the only caveat being that some require you to disable the 3.3V rail on your SATA connector, either by cutting the wire or taping some pins on your HDD with kapton tape. Without the workaround some of these shucked drives will not power up properly when connected to a SATA power plug that also provides 3.3V.