They have a 5-year warranty! (The Red Pro ones do at least.) And this failure mode makes it impossible to rebuild a degraded array if you have one of these drives in that's 4 years old.

Warranties vary based on line. I bought a Red Plus drive last week and it is 3 years, the blue is 2 years.

Having dealt with WD's warranty process once, I pledged myself never to deal with that again. After dealing with a broken web-form, I got charged $380 for a non-existent warranty replacement drive. When I disputed the charge on my credit card, I got a phone call from some mid-level executive who apparently was pissed their number was given as a point of contact. When I tried to explain the problem, they insisted I owed them $20 for returning the drive "late".

Probably the worst technology company I have ever dealt with.

I have had a dozen hard drives and nearly half of them failed within 5 years. I would not consider hard drives safe for a decade of use. SSDs are likely much better.

opposite experience here.. set the sleep to a reasonable value, keep the temperatures and power stable, and the better quality spinning disks (7200rpm) are great. I have had three SSDs fail without warning in the same time period, supposedly better quality SSDs.

Me too. Flash is a great technology, but it tends to forget things, especially if there's no power applied to it.

That's fine, but online MTBF is much shorter for hard drives than flash. If you don't use your computers then hard drives make for better cold storage.

I have drives from 2008 and 2011 which are still going fine.(WD black, and Samsung)