well, don’t worry, I’m well aware that any “major” brand has its ups and downs… ok, maybe some more than others… and some guys less lucky than others, regardless of the brand 
It must be indeed.
Regarding this particular disk, the problem is it was part of a system a friend replaced, so I used it to set a computer up at my family, so… idk really know what happened before, did he went scuba-diving with it or something ¯_ (ツ)_/¯ (which should have kept it cool btw…)
As a side note, if you prefer a GUI, gnome-disk-utility will report SMART readings.
It is very useful. I use it for burning images to a storage device, benchmarking partitions, and a lot of other things.
Pudge
On KDE Plasma, you can see them in the Info Center as long as you have plasma-disks installed.
My Western Digital Black are going strong with
Power On Hours: 12,367
Unsafe Shutdowns: 215
Zero errors.
then it must be well and truly broken.
It happens, which is sad but failures like this taught me the value of backups (though often still delete files I shouldn’t)