I bought a 500GB WD Green drive in 2010, and in 2011 I needed a second 500GB disk in a hurry. I went to a local supplier and all I could get was a Seagate 500GB disk. Oh well, beggars can't be choosers.
I retired them both earlier this year, replacing them with a single 2TB WD Blue drive to augment my SSD. They are both still fully functional, not so much as a SMART error.
I chalk it up to two things: The first is an extremely low number of power cycles. The second is that I never moved the computer thy were in until after they'd finished spinning down.
I also generally tend to keep drives powered up, and they indeed tend to live long. Still, I have to be on alert for failing drives. I had four of the WD30EFRX together in a 2x2 pool (roughly equivalent to RAID10). One day, one of them began showing checksum errors after a scrub, and I replaced it with a Toshiba DT01ACA300.
Once the bad drive was out of the pool, I ran a full self-test on it, which it failed. I did at least get five years of service out of it, but in any case, it's time for me to think about some newer hardware.
For my next NAS, I'm kind of leaning towards using 2x8TB mirrored, with a third drive to be rotated into the mirror, splitting off the rotated-out drive as an offline backup.
Mine was in a home NAS server, almost never powered down, or moved, they die nonetheless, the replacement I bought, mostly TOSHIBA models, still works at this very moment, NONE of them failed.
I retired them both earlier this year, replacing them with a single 2TB WD Blue drive to augment my SSD. They are both still fully functional, not so much as a SMART error.
I chalk it up to two things: The first is an extremely low number of power cycles. The second is that I never moved the computer thy were in until after they'd finished spinning down.