I'm assuming your speaking for experience...
Oh yeah. WD, Seagate and everything else. I currently back up in my office, to my house and to the cloud. Every so often one of the drives go dead (of course, not the cloud). Right now the one in my office is ready for the funeral and I have to put a new one in. Yes, internal as well, but I find internal drives, for some reason, die less frequently. Also, they always die after you can't get any support anymore.
The last time the drive in my house went dead I took it apart, took out the drive itself, set up the wiring in my office computer to accept a second drive, bought a new external drive, copied the old drive to the new external one, put back the computer as it was, put the new external in my house and it never realized anything happened! The boards on external drives can die and you can still have a viable drive. Good thing to keep in mind.