Performance differences between HDDs are really rather meaningless:
All are slow compared to SSDs and there's no point in paying super high prices for some "performance".
And if you care about noise, 7200rpm drives optimized for enterprise use can be noisy.
Esepcially for movies and music 5400rpm drive is more than enough.
For reliability we have really very little data nowadays.
15 years ago Storagereview had database of drives submitted by site users, but I don't think that's been active in long time.
At first Seagate was on top with Barracuda ATA IV and successors faring very well.
Then situation evened and Seagate even had drives with firmware bug self bricking them.
And quality can well differ between manufacturing batches.
Even some shipment could have been banged during transporation making those drives weaker.
Only way to get some guarantee that single drive failure won't force you to do manual work in reinstalling games/getting data from back ups would be RAID1.
Anyway if you play one or two games for some time and then switch to another game or two, then SSD caching with PrimoCache would be way to go.
When you first time open some game loading will happen at speed of HDD.
But next game start happens at speed of SSD and with maps using lots of common assets also loading next level etc starts to speed up to SSD level.
And playing same level again loads up from SSD cache.
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/did-some-benchmarking-of-an-ssd-caching-solution.2533859/
Eventually when cache fills, the least used/longest time ago used data is evicted to make room for new data.
For example 30-50GB cache could hold multiple smaller/older games before filling.
https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/index.html
SSD caching is that Level 2 cache.
https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/instructions-create-cache.html
https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/instructions-manage-l2storage.html
