There are a lot of factors. Manufacturing process, head, lubrication, insulation, material thickness.

Nobody can give you a specific answer without a forensic teardown. I would say it’s probably the casing, refinements in head size, and noise canceling insulation inside the drive.

Drive noise measurement is always a frustrating thing to keep track of. It’s much easier to just find a solution to isolate the drive noise completely and not worry about it.

Almost no chance of that ever happening.

It’s unlikely any long term failure would be known this soon. Which is why you don’t see stats.

There’s nothing like the SanDisk SSD failure debacle, at least, known in the community.

I deal with a few family friends who have Mac and use Office. And they cannot grasp this.

Takes hours of training to explain that they have to click the offline save button, inside the save panel, to not get lost on a OneDrive.

If you mean recover the data on it, a failed drive can only potentially be recovered by a professional facility. This is why you should have multiple backups, always.

NAS drives are often the same drives as consumer. Sometimes they have more durable and quieter noise. Sometimes they use slightly different drive components/design. But realistically, most consumer 3.5-inch drives will work fine.

If drives are expensive where you live, it’s best to pick an affordable non-NAS drive with a long warranty. The more expensive the drive, the more important warranty term matters… as you are experiencing.

4TB SSDs are in the $200 USD range and have 5 year warranty now (in many regions/vendors). If you only need 6TB, you may want to go with SSD for more durability.

A MacBook Pro in 2023 that doesn’t support USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (yes, it has USB4, but not the most common high-performance SSD spec, 3.2 Gen 2x2)… and a base spec that can’t support two external displays.

I’m shocked, simply shocked it’s already being discounted.

So different than come Spring time, expect Apple to make a cheaper MacBook.

Think M1 inside the body of the old Haswell/Broadwell-era MacBook Air.