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?
Not specific to external enclosures, but something I didn't know for a long time is all drives will get bit errors or corruption when left in storage.
HDDs will get uncorrectable bit errors if cylinders are not read for a while (the drive does error correction while reading and rewrites the fixed data). So leave windows defragment on or once a year have read everything on it (cat/sha1, backup elsewhere).
SSDs will get uncorrectable bit errors unless they are powered on for a substantial time. If you have old ones that you use for backups every 6 months or so leave them plugged in for a good while.