All WD drives I bought in the last decade work as expected (0), including the NAS ones bought after the introduction of that SMR thing; I just made sure they ar

All WD drives I bought in the last decade work as expected (0), including the NAS ones bought after the introduction of that SMR thing; I just made sure they are either Plus or Pro, not the plain Red ones, which are SMR-plagued. I was also lucky with SSDs, but especially on desktops I use small ones as I still prefer to keep /home dirs and RAID arrays on old rusty drives. 0: A couple exceptions: Two WD Red (before SMR) which I took out from my old NAS to put bigger drives in place, and put in a drawer while they were still perfectly healthy. After like 2.5 years in their anti static bags and normal conditions, no excessive heat, no moisture, no magnetic fields etc, I took them out because I needed a spare disk and checked them: both were not working, one completely dead and the other barely recognizable but unreadable. The first didn't even show up once connected; I tried to clean all contacts, including the pins on the controller pcb to no avail, and eventually had to ditch it; the 2nd one could be reused only after a full reformat; no way to recover old data, not even using testdisk. I never experienced nor expected anything like that, and frankly it worries me quite a lot.