I've had bad experiences with Toshiba brand drives, whereas WD can take a beating and maintain its integrity. Love WD drives. It didn't really brick, I dont think. The HDD malfunctioned, and all data on-board was lost, as well as becoming unusable. "Shit happens" as they say.
A lot of the time when your drive 'bricks itself' what's happened is the controller chip on the drive has died. This is pretty easy to get recovered if you take it to a hard drive recovery place - as they can just install a new controller. But backups are good. I have an external backup HD which I copy to.
So recently I was moving a lot of the models I created from the whole of last year and the year prior to a new drive. Mid-transfer, the drive disconnected and the bricked itself. Unfortunately (and stupidly), those files were the only ones I had available, aside from some character work I had begun on my Dropbox. So a vast…