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?
Kind of - drives automatically stop spinning and park their heads when they haven't been used for a few mins. This is what tends to wear them out.
The solution isn't to stop using them, though (that's obviously idiotic). What you can do is either disable the sleep function if you're tech savvy, or better yet, you can use a program like this to keep it from going to sleep. All the program does is write a few bytes of text to a file on the drive every X minutes (I recommend setting it to 2 mins).
Depends on the drive. And of course, unless you're using the drives every 3 minutes and then stopping for 3 minutes, this is actually good for the drive. You don't want it to be spinning for 3 days when it's used once.
Obviously, this guy just wants to sell something to our user. The whole claim is ridiculous.
Yes you do. Drives should ideally be spinning 24/7 if you want it to have the longest possible lifespan.