I've found most HGST drives to be great. Many of the newer WD datacenter drives are essentially HGST drives. The only drives I would avoid currently are SMR based drives like the Seagate Archive and Exos series as well as some of their less expensive desktop drives. There are some new, lower capacity WD Red drives that are also SMR - which seems like a bad idea - I wouldn't think NAS and SMR should be combined. If you aren't familiar with SMR technology, they increase areal density by shingling the tracks over one another. This should be fine, but if you need to make a change, the drive needs to read the tracks in the area, make the change, and re-write the affected tracks, causing a significant performance hit to random write operations. They typically have enough cache to make this less noticeable, but if you do any significant amount of non-sequential writes, your write speed will drop to almost nothing. I would also expect error recovery to be more difficult with shingled tracks.
I try to buy enterprise grade 7,200 rpm drives. Enterprise grade SATA drives will work fine for most desktop work, they are rated to have a lower read rate - but that might just be marketing. The issue you hopefully won't run into is that they don't spend much time on error recovery before moving on to the next operation. I have no qualms with Seagate, HGST or WD at that level. I consider WD Black and Red Pro drives to be Enterprise quality as well as Seagate's Ironwolf Pro. I don't see failures with today's larger drives like what we used to see with the 1.5 to 3TB drives of Seagate's past. I tend to pull them out of use after about 5 years. My only real concern with large drives is the long rebuild time in an array, which isn't an issue for desktop use.
None of the drives are perfect. .1% failure rate is great until you are that .1%, MTBF numbers are almost useless for single drive scenarios. My best recommendation, regardless of what you buy, is to backup your photos to a cloud storage provider of some sort, as well as multiple local backups. The more backups, the better. I keep my family photos and important documents on my local machine on a 1.8TB drive, which is duplicated to a SAN with a multi-drive RAID array. I also make quarterly backups to rotating drives that sit on the shelf when they aren't being backed-up to. And of course, the cloud. If your house burns down or gets flooded or blown away, you'll still be able to get your photos back from Apple, Google, or Backblaze.
Something else to keep in mind. People talk about how unreliable external drives are - and that is true, but I think a lot of that has to do with handling. Internal drives don't get touched once they are installed. External drives get knocked over, dropped, unplugged and moved while the discs are still spinning, heads flying, etc. The things I've seen people do with external drives is mind boggling, which is why I am now more inclined to recommend something like a Samsung T5 external SSD for regular external use - much less likely to be damaged during handling.
SSDs are awesome for the OS - life changing, really. They are also great for backups due to speed, but not as the only backup.
I know this is a lot of words, but maybe some of them will be useful.
