What were the designers thinking making two pieces?
I never did understand what their thinking was. Maybe they considered offering the drives in the casing by themselves, without the base, at a lower cost so you could have multiple external drives and swap them as needed, just using the same base? They even had separate part and serial numbers on them. (And then nobody cared enough to bother making them available.) Or it was cheaper for them to RMA their crappy drives because they didn't have to replace that part? But it worked out great for me in my job for years because if one of the drives failed at a client's office and couldn't be RMA'd, we'd end up with a perfectly good base and could keep them to use for working with bare drives externally. They work fine just plugging a bare HDD or SSD into, as long as you lay them flat, so they became a tool for our techs to carry around or have in our office work room, and I ended up taking one home and have had it for years used on and off.
But having that part separate has nothing to do with the reliability of the power connector, obviously. Even if they were a single piece like the current Seagate and WD models, the power connector could wear out. It's still just a piece of metal with a couple of pins soldered to a PCB. They just wear out when they're plugged/unplugged a lot, or hang at an angle all the time.
The big external drives are nothing more than a normal desktop drive put into a casing with a USB interface, but they do get warmer during use since there's no airflow other than a little bit of ambient air through the vents, so they may tend to die sooner when they're always plugged in. But if they're just unplugged and set aside, they'd have the same lifespan as a bare drive. But that lifespan has been discovered to be much less than we once thought. The music industry has recently lost a lot of their data, like master recordings, because the hard drives they stored them on went bad. Ten years seems to be a risky length of time to just let them sit as the media surface degrades in that time. (There could also be other issues like the spindle motor grease going bad, etc., but the media seems to be the real issue.) If you took them out once a year and moved the data off to do a full format then moved it back onto the drive, that activity might "refresh" the magnetic material and make them last a bit longer, but just it's also a chemical process that makes it detach from the surface so it's going to happen eventually. Two years is maybe the lifespan if it's under constant use (Seagate has poor reliability anyway), but 5 years when sitting unused ought to be acceptable and mostly safe. Sixteen years is definitely taking it to the extreme.
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