Your average drive is only warrantied for three years and then you are gambling with it as soon as you use it. Likewise, after several days of research, the conclusion was that the Hitachi Ultrastar drives are the best. Specifically the 3TB drives as they were the least likely to fail by a significant margin. The data was compiled from large data warehouses.

But still they are susceptible to failure and ones best option is to use a NAS/RAID with a two drive redundancy for extra safety. Something like the Drobo 5N.

As far as SATA to SAS drives go, a SAS connection will apparently take a SATA drive but not the other way around. Unfortunately, the Macs have a SATA connection. However,  it might be possible to by an adaptor but it just gets messy from here.

References:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-1904656/connect-sas-hard-drive-sata-interface.html

Andrew.