Ahh a subject I am somewhat familiar with!
Firstly it's impossible to recommend a hard drive that is reliable.
Reliable for how long, under what conditions?
Data reliability is directly proportional to the number of backups you have stored at different locations and, with rapidly changing technology, probably on different types of storage devices.
A more recent option is remote cloud storage which has pros and cons.
I would never rely on cloud storage exclusively due to potential issues such as data theft or having your data subject to exorbitant storage fees by the corporate cowboys.
All hard drives will fail eventually so it's not a matter of "if', it's a matter of "when" although some manufacturers have occasionally produced models that had high premature failure rates. (see below)
That aside however 'most' hard drives tend to run for years which, considering the precision engineering required to manufacture a mechanical HD, I find quite amazing since they can be bought for well under $100 and are infinitely more reliable than floppy discs ever were.
SSD's are immune from mechanical shock but are supposed to be 'programmed' to only allow a finite number of read/write operations and of course are much more expensive than a mechanical HDD per gig.
If anyone has the lowdown on SSD life expectancy please comment.
It appears HDD's along with many peripheral devices are all heading towards USB-C.
USB2 adaptors are available but to be frank I would not wish to copy terabytes of data via USB2 unless you have plenty of spare time on your hands.
As mentioned if the drive makes a clicking or scraping noise then DO NOT attempt to operate it as the heads maybe literally scraping the magnetic coating off the disc platters which will make data recovery from that section of the disc impossible. (see the link below for examples of this)
Also it's not a good idea to use DIY data recovery software if the drive is making ugly noises as you may just exacerbate the above.
In the early 2000's I was one of the many 'victims' of IBM's 'Deathstar' 75GXP hard drive debacle.
It was praised in every review when it came out and promoted as a "Safe and Reliable" means of storing your data by IBM.
It boasted SCSI like performance from an IDE drive and it was certainly fast for an IDE drive.
Because of their speed many 75GXP's were bought for installation in servers. (this ends badly!)
My 'Deathstar' lasted under two weeks from purchase at which point it developed what became know as the 'Deathstar' "Click of Death". Many began failing almost immediately after installation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeskstarThe lesson I discovered the hard way was a drive doesn't have to be old and abused to fail without warning.
Because of this I would avoid using exactly the same model drives to use as primary and backup drives.
It's safer to use two different brands/models.
(There were cases where multiple IBM 75GXP drives installed in a single server all simultaneously failed over a single weekend.)
After consistently denying that the failure rate of the 75GXP's was any higher than 'normal' IBM settled a class action lawsuit and promptly left the hard drive business selling their entire hard drive division to Hitachi.
I have a friend who had some crowd here in Melbourne (don't know about Sydney) recover data from one of his crashed drives (not an IBM) sometime back. I'll ask him about it and let you know.
I have heard that data recovery businesses often charge based upon the ability of the customer to pay.
For example it may cost QANTAS airlines a lot more to recover 1 gigabyte of corporate financial data than say 1 gigabyte of Aunty Sue's European holiday photos and home video clips.