Most drives adhere to the "bathtub" graph: if anything goes wrong with a HDD it will either die a spectacular death young or live a long life until there are too many bad sectors due to age

Lasted 8 days shy of one year before unreadable sectors started popping up

If you are planning on using this drive for smaller files and lost of them then I recommend 512 or 4096 byte sectors

no SMART errors, no bad sectors, it just works

one bad sector on it

I immediately ordered a replacement drive (Toshiba this time) and discovered a few more files overlapping unreadable sectors when attempting to transfer data

no SMART errors, no bad sectors, it just works

Admittedly, the Seagate did have some bad sectors, but Windows 8.1 automatically fixed the drive and I can access all of my data on it now (in windows!!

almost 1 year in and loads and loads of bad sectors

When not using A/C idle temps are 43-44 C but when A/C on it goes below 40

The only thing I can get from the HDD is initialization and I/O errors