According to SERT Data Recovery, "Western Digital and Seagate hard drives are notorious for having firmware problems." I had a devastating failure that the wonderful people at Desert Data Recovery are doing their utmost to fix...

... but I NEVER want to be in this position ever again. How would I go about picking a better, more dependable brand/model of external drive? I'm unfortunately a little tech illiterate; does anybody have advice on how to start learning?

https://sertdatarecovery.com/hard-drive-data-recovery/how-to-fix-corrupted-or-damaged-firmware