I had bad experiences with Seagate between 2002 and 2009. Multiple, sudden, premature drive failures under ideal operating conditions. I haven’t bought a Seagate drive in over 10 years.

WD enterprise grade hardware is still good for me, as of 2 years ago. Their customer service sucks but the hardware is still good

In general I tend to go for Toshiba or Hitachi (rebranded to a different name if I recall…) if I have a preference. I have some really old drives like 15+ years old still chugging along.

I like my Shield but it was a real bummer that I couldn’t just plug in a USB drive and play movies on it. It’s annoying that I have to setup Plex or Jellyfin or whatever to serve movies to the Shield

Just tried it with an Instagram story link and it didn’t work. I love this idea though. I’ll try again in a few months

I recently loaded the latest Ubuntu LTS onto my old Surface Pro and I wish I had done it a long time ago. It works so much better than Windows. Zero issues with any hardware. I don’t have a digitizer pen though I remember reading you can load a special kernel if you have any issues with it. Give it a go, I think you’ll be happy you did