Trying to decide about backup drive.

I already asked this in the thread linked below but I thought this might get more traction in the General section
Questions about setting up a network drive

Until now I have been using a 2TB WD My Cloud as a network drive and a 3TB WD My Book as a backup drive with Karen's Replicator doing a file by file backup every night.
Some while ago I noticed that my files weren't being backed up so I did a bunch of experimenting and found that it would work if I re-booted the My Book it would work OK for a few weeks and I'd have to re-boot it again. The last few times it wouldn't re-boot until I disconnected it, gave it a few gentle taps and re-connected it so I'm pretty sure the HDD in it is on the way out.

The My Cloud is older and gets more use so I was thinking I probably needed to replace both of them before I have a big problem but I did some research and learned that the the My Cloud comes with a WD Red HDD (known for longevity so as long as I have a reliable backup I can leave it alone if it is working OK).

But I need to do something about the My Book. What I found about the My Book said they come with whatever HDD WD have a lot of on hand at time of manufacture, usually Blue or Green but some pages claim that some of them came with Red drives with white labels. I opened my My Book and it has a Green HDD.

Apparently the Red ones are designed for use in network drives where they are on 24/7 for their entire life but they also work well as internal hard drives in computers and other applications.

I have come up with several options:

- 4TB red HDD from WD's Amazon store for about $100 CAD. If I'm reading things right one of those should last a long time in the My Book.

- New 4TB My Book (different case design from the one I have) for $120

- 4TB WD Elements desktop external drive (similar case to my My Book) for $115.
- 4TB WD My Passport portable external SSD for $118
- There are also several 4TB external drives from Seagate, Toshiba &c in the same price range.

I really don't know much about this sort of thing so I'd like some other opinions before I make a final decision.

Funny that they come with blue or green drives. WD themselves suggest to put Reds in there

I started to have doubts whether the drive itself or the enclosure is the problem. The only other external SATA drive enclosure I have is for 2.5" HDDs and the drive wouldn't connect when I plugged that enclosure's board onto it. I also tried plugging a couple of other drives into the board from the My Book and the computer didn't recognize them either (I'm not sure whether that might be because the My Book needs to have the drive formatted in a specific way).

So with those doubts in mind I decided it would be best to replace the whole thing. In the absence of any real recommendations I re-visited my options (turns out the Passport I was looking at wasn't an SSD after all), read a few reviews and ordered a new 4TB WE Elements Portable External Drive from the WD store on Amazon.

I also found what looks like a halfway decent SATA enclosure for a reasonable price so I ordered one of them too. I figure worst case it won't be a bad thing to have and best case the My Book's drive will work in it.
Eagle Tech Consus 3.5" USB 2.0 External SATA HDD Enclosure up to 3 TB 183094000054 | eBay

Both of them should be here in about a week.

Both of them arrived sooner than expected.

The Elements has been installed as my backup drive for a week and Karen's Replicator has not reported any errors or failures in that time so all is good on that front.

I tried installing the 3TB drive from the My Book in the Eagle Tech enclosure. The enclosure showed in the USB Safely Remove list but the drive did not appear in This PC (yes, I did let it perk for a long time because it is a large drive). I found it in Disk Management, showing as not initialized but when I told it to initialize it gave an error message.
I had mixed results with some smaller SATA HDDs (250-750 GB) but I really don't have time to mess around with stuff like that at this time of year so I packed it all up until I have time to try connecting them directly to a computer.

For now I'm going to mark this solved.