Which is a real shame, because WD was until recently the gold standard of disk drive reliability. To my recollection, I’ve never seen a WD drive fail.

Oh boy, I've had about 10 drive failures out of like 46 drives, all WD. I've had 3 WD Red Pro 6TBs fail and 7 WD Red 6TBs fail. This has been over around 7 or so years, although one of the WD Red Pro 6TB drives was bought this year and failed within 2 weeks (over 1000 bad sectors, it had the worst SMART stats I'd ever seen).

The WD Red 6TBs are particularly bad, I've had better luck with the WD Red Pro 6TBs, and then IIRC the WD Red 3TBs are like by far the worst out of WD's Reds.

Not to mention, WD already tried pulling a fast one on customers when they swapped out WD Red drives with SMR drives then had to make a WD Red Plus for their (existing) CMR Red drives. I had a WD Red 6TB drive go bad, replaced it with a brand new WD Red Plus 6TB which immediately went bad, then replaced it with a WD Red Pro 6TB which also went bad within a few days. I replaced that one once again with a brand new WD Red Pro 6TB (I love brick and mortar PC stores, I got an awesome PC store near me) and that drive has been perfectly fine for a few months. My original WD Red 6TB drive in question did last me like, 6 or 7 years, I just got really unlucky with two quick failures in a row but all is good now.

I've not had a great experience with WD, but I've still heard worse things about Seagate so I am sticking with my WD Red Pro 6TBs for now.