brands have a specific set of manufacturing facilities and plants, in general, ok sometimes that overlaps but not often with long established brands do they use competitors, usually due to contractual obligations

a backup is worthless if it is stored on a device with poor quality control as the worse the QA standard, the more likely that when you come to rely on it, it's not working

fortunately, for the most part flash storage doesn't become unreadable when it fails, but spinning disks can gum up due to bad lubricants that have aged and the disk doesn't spin, or the media craps out leading to a higher error rate than the drive's FEC setup (which is not reed solomon like it is on ISO formated storage btw, also i think tape backups use RS FEC)

usually there is a cost premium associated with the level of QA that a manufacturer requires of their devices, and this QA level usually entails stress testing a certain percentage of each production batch to establish a benchmark for the batch lifespan estimate and thus insuring the warranties are not likely to void very often until after the devices fail

this is why it's worth spending a little extra on a better quality device with a lower return rate because it likely means they sacrifice a larger percentage of production to quality assurance and that warranty period has more relation to reality than their budget for covering this cost

long warranty periods don't necessarily mean that the devices are likely to last longer, just that the sales volume enables them to cover a higher failure rate

i don't know what WD's QA benchmarks are these days but me and semisol both avoid this brand because in the days of spinning disks, they were notorious for failing before the warranty was out, or not long after it, whereas other devices, sometimes even with shorter warranties, would last far longer in practise.

this is a practise known as "loss leading" in the industry and tends to be used by manufacturers that are aiming at cheapskate users like you

you can risk your data with it but it's very likely that you pay for your decision to go with a cheapskate company with a 3 failures at once situation and you lose data completely