dan , 5 hours ago (edited 5 hours ago)

This might be an unpopular opinion but I avoid Western Digital hard drives after their two recent issues:

• In 2020, they silently started selling SMR (shingled magnetic recording) drives as NAS drives, without labeling them as such, even though they’re not appropriate for use in a NAS. They can get very slow and cause issues during RAID rebuilds. tomshardware.com/…/wd-fesses-up-some-red-hdds-use…
• In 2023, they started flagging drives with a warning just because they had been powered on for three years (26,280 hours), even if all the SMART data was fine. The “fix” was updating systems like Synology to totally ignore WD’s alerting (WDDA) and only use SMART. I think the warnings are still present, but NAS software just ignores them now. arstechnica.com/…/clearly-predatory-western-digit…

Both were intentional changes to try and increase profits.

I’m using Seagate Exos drives, which are the same price or even cheaper than WD Red Pro drives, when on sale.