Read the book not realizing the film satirizes the book and kept waiting for some kind of punchline. Finished thinking “wait, the author was serious?”

I’ll do you one better: computers suck in general if you’re not really into tech

I’ve had good experiences with both WD and Seagate. According to industry, most HDDs will last at least 3-5 years if they are used regularly, but you can also monitor their health via a number of tools for better lifespan estimation, e.g. smartctl and smartd on Linux. Risk management and a good hardware failure mitigation strategy will ultimately help protect your data for the long run though.