They're not that bad in my humble opinion. I've done maintenance on hundreds of Dell and HP workstations which had WD disks (From nvme to ide disks). They're just a bit slow.
Never trusted WD cloud though. History taught me no disk or nas is safe when it's reachable via the big bad internet.
Had to look up[1] what the SMR scam was about, short summary: different disks with lower random I/O performance were sold without being marked as such.
The problem with SMR is not the worse performance, but inability of operating as just a plain hard drive.
You throw terabytes at CMR drive - it's just writes them to LBAs.
You do the same at SMR drive - as soon as it's depletes FastCache/MediaCache or whatever it's called (buffer zones in CMR style to handle bursts of incoming data) it crawls to 1990's speeds OR even drops out of system.
But honestly, there is almost no options left at the moment. There is no 2.5" CMR drives anymore and with 3.5" it's only a bigger disks with a price premium.
The tech behind SMR is intriguing to me, but I really don't want it anywhere near data that I consider important.
A lot of folks don't realize that SMR drives have a lot more in common with SSD firmware with its emulated virtual block layer and wear leveling than a traditional HDD. Having the same kind of virtual block layer is where the problems come from.
With SSDs, virtual blocks stored in pages that are about to be erased have to be relocated elsewhere. SMR drives have to do the same sort of thing but with sequential recording for the overlapping tracks. All the same nightmares exist including garbage collection/reclaimation, de-fragmentation, managing TRIM (or parsing NTFS data structures), etc etc. With SMR, handling the worst case scenarios are made more difficult by seek latency - something that isn't as much of an issue for SSD storage.
All of this tends to invalidate cherished assumptions that unix/linux file systems make about HDD storage. And that's ignoring the issues about the devices reaching timeout thresholds - again, the kinds of things that Windows is OK with but really hurts linux/unix systems.
I'm giving Toshiba a try now with two MG09 18TB HDDs. 5 year warranty and peak transfer rates of nearly 300 MB/s.
I've had bad luck with two Seagate 4TB ST4000DM000 HDDs, they both failed after warranty was over. I think it was a bad model. My other Seagate disks (2x 8TB CMR and 2x 8TB SMR) have been working just fine for a few years.
I've bought around like 9 WD HDDs so far, passports, books, internal SATA ones, Red NAS ones, and all of them are either still running or never outright failed. Meanwhile 2 of the 3 Seagate HDDs I had failed in a way that resulted in data loss ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Needless to say I only buy WD if I ever still need an HDD. Wouldn't ever use their cloud though.
Looking at Backblaze's stats, it's true WD are a little better off, but not by a huge amount.
If you care about a single drive dying, then yeah, buy WD I guess, but at the same time, I can't imagine a sane case to rely on any single drive not failing. I'd always have redundancy if I am talking spinning disk (and of course backups regardless), because the reality is no matter who makes it, eventually it'll die, and none of them can guarantee anything.
"Lost" a lot of backups to a WD MyBook a while ago.
The story is interesting enough to mention: first it showed up as non-formatted. Turned out the disk was encrypted and the key was stored in the enclosure which somehow lost it.
After a while I found out the encryption key was stored on the disk on a predictable location and could be extracted and used to decrypt the disk, but at that point the disk had stopped answering completely.
I still keep it around because someday I will probably try to get a recovery company to look at it, but I still wonder why they put that "encryption" feature there in the first place.
