Comment by wayne_h

Data recovery guy here...

Failure of external drives has mostly to do with their handling.

They get bumped around while runnning.

People trip over the cords and knock them over.

They stack them like pancakes and they overheat. They block the fans and cause overheating.

Many enclosures are designed to look stylish - but don't cool well.

Heads fly at nanometers over the surface - they dont tolerate bumps well.

The drives we recover from external enclosures appear to be the same as bare drives that we recover.