I always use enterprise drives, whether new or recertified. All my drives, including the offline drives which gets connected maybe once every 2-3 months to offload data from RAID6 are also enterprise drives. I have no consumer level hard drives.
I know that portable hard drives do not have the workload ratings of NAS or enterprise drives, or maybe even less that normal desktop drives, but they do have one unique property.
If I ever need to get data off of an enterprise drive or any desktop drives and I do not have a dock or PC, I can't get it. They require 12v. But portable hard drives are bus powered, and in an emergency, it will be easier to get data from a portable drive. No need to worry about power as they can get the juice from most usb ports.
Considering this, do you think they can have a place in a backup system where a different media is recommended?