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I've heard that the lower quality drives get sold as portable ones since they wouldn't likely be powered on for as long as ones that were meant to be in computers. There's been various comments here and elsewhere about "shucked" drives not lasting as long, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21695478

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I assumed that but then I've been torturing a usb WD 14TB drive for years with 24/7 writes backing up a busy logging server and it hasn't missed a beat. I guess it's just the luck of the draw?

i dont know if true, but i imagine that a drive that is not constantly powered on and off might last longer.

True, and this one has the luxury of living in a data centre kept at a constant 27C and never being moved or knocked over. As far as USB hard drives go, this one is living its best life.

Fwiw (antidotal) I have 8 shucked WD drives in my my nas approaching 5/6 years worth of power-on hours. Moderate to medium read-mostly use case. No data integrity issues (according to zfs).

Certainly getting near the age where I wouldn't be shocked if I started seeing failures crop up, but I've gotten my savings plenty worth there.

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