I added three external hard drives to the initial table, two Western Digital Elements (different form factors/product lines, so I thought it relevant to include them) and one Toshiba Canvio.
I noticed an interesting pattern with the smartctl command in that it always detected these as “internal” hard drives, not “external”. I guess it’s possible that is what the actual drive is on the inside? I’m not familiar enough with how external hard drives are made to confirm this, but I did notice that smartctl got the RPMs wrong each time, so I’m not sure about that.
I did want to expand on the Toshiba drive I listed… I receive three of them from my brother. He ordered one from Amazon and they sent him a case haha. So he had a bunch of extras and handed a few off to me. Out of the three, only one remains usable. The other two failed within the first 60 days of usage, with 100% data loss occurring on one of them. Not fun!
The one that remains usable has encountered 8 “errors” (according to smartctl) recently, but the drive remains usable and the smartctl tests are coming back fine, I’m not sure how much longer I’ll continue to use it though…