I've been doing this for at least a decade now and the drives are just as reliable as if you bought them normally. The only downside is having to block one of the pins on the SATA connector with kapton tape for it to work.
My second machine uses such disks. They work fine. They're a bit more expensive than recertified datacenter WDs from SPD though. I can run a 48TB array with 4-disk redundancy with such disks from SPD for the price of the equivalent 48TB array made of shucked external WDs with 2-disk redundancy. The 4-disk redundant system will be more performant. I'm going to use my shucked WD array till it croaks but I'd be buying recertified replacements as the disks die.