I am afraid to buy WD drives since the mid 2000s. I used to store all my media in them, and with WD every 1 to 2 years, my drive would be corrupted to the point that it’d need formatting. Having to rebuild my collections multiple, with always “improved” WD models moved me away from them forever. I don’t even buy server grade WDs.
There are a limited number of hard drive manufacturers. All of them had reliability issues at some point. Like the IBM "deathstar" and the Seagate "failacuda", I don't know about an equivalent from WD. Reliability come and go, and you don't even know when you buy because problems can take years to develop, and it is dependent on usage.
They are all in the same ballpark, with Seagate a bit worse than the others but not terrible like it was a few years ago. WD tends to be consistently in the middle of the pack.
The latest fail from WD (as a hard drive manufacturer) was when they sneaked inadequate SMR technology into "red" consumer-grade NAS drives. But others did more or less the same. Now, all manufacturers are transparent about the technology used and newer "red plus" drives from WD are CMR.
So I'd say, for now, I'd say WD is as good (or as bad) as any other and I would let price decide. For reliability, that's what RAID is for. And in any case, RAID or not, and no matter how reliable your disks are, if your data is precious, you need backups too.
