I have been running western digital drives for 25+ years they are my go to brand. Greens, Blacks, Reds, Blues, 15 years or so ago I had a few of them that started making funny noises and I knew that they needed to be replaced So I went and got a few new drives moved the data and put the ones making funny noises into a box where all the old drives go. I recently had a Red fail in a My cloud but that was only after I dropped it down a flight of stairs guessing that was my fault. It was used as a redundant back up so nothing lost there. I have two 500 GB NVME SN750 Black drives one has Mac OS; one runs my windows VM; all my data is stored on Samsung 1tb 960 Evo just because that is what was available at Fry's when I bought it. I have around 10TB of old HD stored in the box I spoke of previously I would gather if I plugged them in they would all work still even the ones that were making funny noises "sounded like a failing motor not damaged heads"! I have not ever had a WD drive out right fail on me however, I have had Maxtor Drives, Seagate drives, Hitach "HGST", and Kingston drives fail and take the data with them. Hitach is now owned by WD though I am not sure if the drive that failed was before or after WD owned them. I had one Kingston drive that failed in a strange way and that is the data all remains but the drive is locked in a read only kind of mode. If you format it; delete the data; destroy the portion table, and rebuild it; then reboot the data comes back. This is just my personal experience others might tell you that WD is trash and every drive they have had from WD has failed. Keep in mind that WD NVME drives are sandisk, WD acquired them so they did not have to develop their own flash storage.