I recently had my external HDD that I kept movies on die and when I tried to have the data recovered the tech guy said that regularly accessing files on external HDD's reduced their life span. He obviously tried to upsell me an external media player.
I've never heard of this before, does regularly accessing media on standard external HD's degrade their lifespan? Is it actually better to use an external media player?
Traditionally the thing that causes HDDs to fail is powering them down. As a general rule if they're on and spinning they will continue to run. And in that regard the reason an external media player would be more reliable is it would generally stay powered on and therefore keep the HDD on and spinning.