Interesting. That has not been our experience at work.

Add the WDDA analytics where even if nothing is wrong with the drives, after three years, WDDA starts to complain about drive health (in the Synology NASes - I know this because we use NASes for Content Storage in all our locations), along with the various issues (some of which cannot be fixed) with their SanDisk line, or their quietly replacing CMR for SMR in their NAS/surveillance drives, and one can only wonder.

I confess that I do not know about the WDDA in QNAP NASes, because I am not using WD drives in my TS-873A, but I do know that its firmware does support both the IronWolf Health Management and WDDA, both of which are not technically a part of the firmware of the NASes themselves, but contributed by the drive companies, so I expect something similar on that end.

To be fair, I very much like the WD Gold 18Tb drives, and use them in our work RAIDs quite a lot.

I'm certainly not certain about their new large capacity drives, but WD has not gained back the trust they lost with some of their shady doings for me.