Conversely, I’ve had nothing but bad luck with WD the last few years, and my Seagates have been flawless.
My simple rule is that all drives suck, and always have good backups.
My simple rule is that all drives suck, and always have good backups.
Well, my main reason was that WD decided that just failing "naturally" after a few years wasn't enough, but that a drive having been on for 3 years should be considered the same as "failing" (communicated through WDDA), which led to Synology adopting that for a while. Not sure what the current state is of that, but I intend to swap drives when they fail, not when they turn 3.
I had 4 WD Red 4 TB HDDs like WDC WD40EFRX and 2 out of them already failed SMART long tests and hat uncorrectable errors reported by the kernel after about 25000 hrs powered on. I've messed a lot with the drives bought 3 other used drives and it turned out that one of them had the same failure just undetected.
I was able to "fix" the issue by running testdisk in read-write mode forcing the disk to overwrite the bad sector. That's how I forcefully fix pending sectors on desktop drives. But it seems that WD Reds don't want to replace sectors because the data is still readable. The drive just needs a second or two.
I'm not happy with that but I'm also glad, I could confirm that's not an issue caused by my setup. One would say, I should replace the drive immediately but I trust in ZFS and my backups. I would put the drive on my shelve and maybe reuse it as temporary buffer storage because why would someone buy such a used drive for a high price? In my eyes, it's still okay.
The ones that never failed me were any drives made by Quantum using SCSI interface. 5 drives, zero failure over 10+ years. But those were slower and cooler running units.
I've had 2 drive failures since using BB so it's been worthwhile. But their Download software is pretty dreadful if you have large amount of files. I may try their ship-drive option next time.
Tracking their stock price, they are operating pretty lean, so I don't fault them for having crappy software.