[Netcob]

My WD drives failed pretty consistently, so I'm now giving Seagate a try.

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.

[xurbax]

Well, for me, WD Reds seem to start to go bad at about 3 years, so...

[adapiz]

You might want to read this: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/clearly-predatory-we...

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.