2/8 for me at about the 5 year mark.

I have three that don’t even power around anymore for no reason when I can’t figure out why

I have 8 WD whitelabels that are all around 5 years old. None dead yet but I may have just gotten lucky so far. I'm going to buy 2 of these to start replacing the old ones.

If you bought those all at once, sounds like a bad manufacturing batch.

Honestly at this point I'm buying used drives. I have redundancy anyway, and if I get a 50% discount for buying used and have to buy 10% more drives for extra redundancy, that still comes up Milhouse.

I have 2x8TB, 2x10TB 2x12TB, 2x18TB and 14TB, all shucked. No issues. the 8TB's are at 6 years powered on too.

So for someone who currently relies on external drives, you wouldn't recommend this? Would that be all WD easystores or just the 18tb? I've still got a ways to go before migrating to internals so I can't really afford much more than the $200 thus far

I think you have environmental issues at play. That failure rate is incredibly abnormal.

This is all anecdotal evidence.

I’ve got 8-8TB, 8-12TB, and 3-14TB drives (all white label shucks) bought between 7yrs ago and now. The 8TBs were all bought over 5yrs and no failures. I’ve had 1 -12TB die recently, it was at the 3yr mark.

Yeah before shucking got popular the white labels were helium filled and the 14tb and 10tb drives required the 3 pin tape mod on all my evga and Corsair psus. I won’t be buying wd to shuck again. I’ve had good luck with seagate expansion drives which are actually labeled exos or ironwolfs which are supported with firmware updates from seagate. Warranty claims also isn’t an issue I worry about with seagate.

I’m coming up to the 4 year mark on my wd white labels and they’re a hassle.

I've got 10 drives 5 8 tb going on 6 years and 5 14 tb going on 5 years had 1 8tb develop a bunch of write errors at around 5 years in imo they have been worth the money they have been running 24/7 in my main unraid server