The ones that I have used to connect media to my nvidia shield have worked fine, but the ones that I used inside laptops have all thrown errors and died.
Data Hoarder
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
I'm not sure what you're expecting, the 2.5" drives are generally stuck in the past and underdeveloped, and all the large ones (and even the small-ish ones if they aren't old) are SMR, and their SMR is more perverse than the usual (or they generally just lack oomph and would crunch much longer and worse than their bigger cousins) and you want to use them with ZFS, and they've been already used a lot, and out of warranty.
Like the song says "I fought tougher men but I really can't remember when", it might be possible to be worse but I can't remember how (except maybe for the disks already throwing out errors).
I uses these in my home server, solely because you can fit tow of them sideways into a single 3.5" bay if you use right-angle power connectors. I screw them down to a piece of stiff plastic sheet and then use Velcro to hold that down. I run Proxmox and put them in a ZFS mirror. My VMs and containers run off a small NVMe or mirroed SSDs in the replication server.
That being said, these things work fine for a home file/backup server and don't use much power. Don't expect much more out of them and use solid state storage for your hot data.
I purchased them from Costco. I had to return them after 2 years due to failure. Careful with data stored on those drives.
What kind of life are people getting out of the ST5000LM000
The only real answer is somewhere between DOA and decades. And that any storage device/media can fail at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.
Mine work well as external drives. Keep in mind that according to the datasheet these are not designed for 24/7 runtime, people who tried that had failures
Ebay? I hope you have paid PayPal. With those screenshots you should be able to receive a refund.