I guess different experiences then. I have never had one randomly murder its self. If that was the case, then no one would use that filesystem. I’ve had many microsd cards fail when the controller failed but it was never the fault of the exfat or fat32 filesystem on the drives. In my over 10 years of using btrfs on all my machines I have had it fail twice. Once because the hdd was failing, another because I ran a buggy dedup script on it which hosed it. In all cases it wasn’t the filesystem that caused it.
Not sure. I don’t use any of those drives. You would have to do your own research and read up on the problems and do some tests yourself. I would suggest you read through the tracking thread on the issue to see if you might be part of that: [TRACKING] WD_BLACK SN850 sudden death - #10 by jrenken