Microsoft recently released the results of a long-term, million-machine hardware failure analysis and found that, overall, laptops are more stable than desktops, including the disk subsystem. The original report is available at https://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=144888 with a tl;dr summary at http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/131739-microsoft-analyzes-over-a-million-pc-failures-results-shatter-enthusiast-myths.
Quoting the latter, in turn paraphrasing the former: "Desktops don’t come off looking very good here despite their sedentary nature. The team theorizes that the higher tolerances engineered into the CPU and DRAM, combined with better shock-absorbing capabilities in mobile hard drives may be responsible for the lower failure rate."
So you actually may find higher long-term reliability in a laptop-sized (2.5") drive, as they're built expecting a certain amount of abuse.
I'll let the other answer above speak to the difference between using the same desktop (3.5") hard disk internal to a PC vs. in an external enclosure.
When a new disk fails to show up in Windows Explorer, there can be two reasons :
1. A missing disk driver
In some rare cases, the new disk requires a proprietary driver and cannot work
with the one supplied by Windows.
To check, open up Device Manager and check whether the new disks are visible
under the Disk drives branch or under Unknown devices.
In the first case, Windows has correctly identified the disk.
In the second case, a proprietary driver needs to be installed from
either a CD supplied with the disk or downloaded from the manufacturer's website.
Once the disk is correctly identified in the Device Manager,
we continue to the second phase.
2. The disk was factory-formatted in an incompatible manner
Windows is pretty particular about the way the disk should be formatted.
If an external disk is partitioned into multiple partitions, it risks
to be unrecognized, or worse, only the first partition is recognized.
A new disk should always be examined for such problems before being used.
Open Computer Management and click on Disk Management, then wait for
the disk to show up.
If the disk is partitioned, right-click all partitions and choose Delete.
Once the entire disk is one unallocated space, right-click
and choose New Simple Volume, then follow the wizard.
Be careful to format all disks larger than 2 TB as GPT, since the other option,
MBR, will not use more than the first 2.2 TB of the disk.
Once the disk is formatted and assigned a disk-letter, it is available as
a normal disk.
For more information, see this How-To Geek article :
Understanding Hard Drive Partitioning with Disk Management.
Best Answer
I'd suspect, that those drives haven't failed at all - they were just running out of their specs and should be fine when plugged into a different computer.
Let me explain:
You use the USB ports of your Yoga for two purpouses:
Now the Yogas are notorious for providing less-than-promised current on their USB ports - this results in the disks being always close to starving for power, as writing to a 4TB drive typically comes quite close to the design limits of power draw.
You could use a (quality!) powered USB hub to overcome this - in such a pattern the juice for the drive would be provided by the hub's power supply, not the Yoga.