[lxn]

If they worked so far, they will continue to work in the future.

With my limited understanding, the new models will fail under intensive work-loads. For example adding them to existing RAID setups to replace a failed drive, where in the beginning they have to be sync-ed and they fail under load after a few hours (either by dropping in performance or not being recognized at all).

They will work reasonable well under lower loads (more common for home NAS setups).

The biggest problem, and what the article is trying to point out, is that Western Digital (and Seagate) are doing all they can to hide this info from customers. They even advertise the HDD as being NAS/RAID friendly, when they are clearly not meant for that type of loads.