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?
External media player? That’s going to have a hard drive in it too. Perhaps it’s a better grade hard drive for such things, but I doubt it.
There’s nothing special about media playing that is going to do any different to a hard drive. My network storage that I use for my Plex has been up for 3 years now, 24/7. Of course now that I said that a drive will fail, haha.
Hard drives are notoriously reliable. You just had bad luck or did manage to totally wear a drive out. Backblaze, a cloud storage provider, has been posting hard drive stats for years now. Here’s their report from last year. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2022/ 200,000 drives up for 78 million days and less than 3,000 of them fail. These are drives that are up and working constantly in a data center environment. They aren’t super special industrial drives, they are generic NAS drives.
So I think he was trying to sell you something, and if you’re happy with how what you had was working get a new external drive and carry on.