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?
Hmmm, possibly, the problem is there's always a temporary life span when it comes to hard drives, definitely not a data expert myself or anything so I couldn't know for sure.
What I can comment on is I recently switched to having my stuff pure SSD and I use an external HDD to backup my projects and assets on. The write/read speed on SSDs of course will always be faster but I wasn't quite prepared for how smoothly everything ran. I feel like it's a given that heavy usage of a hard drive reduces the life span lol it could be that your external HDD wasn't really designed for those kind of loads is what he meant. In which case you'll probably want to check the specs of your hard drive next time you buy it. Given that some movie files are several gigabytes depending and the external HDD is going to be reading those files chugging away it does make a degree of sense. I noticed that for my music files if I kept them on the HDD while playing it would often pause while loading it all.
For all my entertainment and games etc. now I keep things on internal SSDs and it's nice.