Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

So, after my 3rd 8TB Seagate Expansion drive failed I started to get suspicious and I did some research on what exactly was going on with these drives. Obviously the price was right for the amount of storage capacity and with the way technology moves, I didn't think much about the lower price, chalking it up to how the world of technology evolves and gets cheaper over time. This assumption came at a cost. After researching and shucking one of the drives that failed (conveniently for Seagate, outside the 1-year warranty) I discovered that the drives they are throwing in the external shells are regular Barracudas. Nothing to cause alarm yet, Barracudas are supposed to be good reliable drives right? Digging a little deeper, I discover that Seagate, Western Digital and pretty much every other drive manufacturers are starting to use SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) technology on their cheaper consumer drives, making the price more feasible for a greater number of consumers. The problem is, these drives are only really good for archival purposes, meaning, you should really only write files to the drive once, never deleting, moving, or re-writing files without major stability issues due to the nature of the way this drive writes data. There are plenty of articles about SMR technology if you google "SMR drive" so I won't go into too technical of a description of how that works, but basically for me, who was expecting to be able to use this drive as I have every other drive I've owned for the last 35+ years, I was sadly mistaken. The act of moving files or deleting and rewriting information seemed to be such a routine and mundane task that I never would imagine that kind of action would contribute to the premature death of 3 of these drives.