I have a decade of storage experience.
Don't mix experiences of old drives with new ones. Every generation has it's own idiosyncrasies.
For example, I had IBM GXP75 Deathstar die on me 2000...click of death. I bought new IBM drive 2001 (generation after) and it has been online and spinning (no spindown enabled) for
7.5 years in old mailserver. I kid you not...7.5 years online time, pulled from SMART registry.
Regarding new WD drives:
There are different drives depending on what they are used for. Desktop drives don't work well in RAID and vice versa. Consumer-grade WD's
arent't meant to be run in RAID arrays. They have TLER disabled (assuming home desktop single-drive operation) and will go into deep-recovery mode on slightest hitch and get flagged as faulty by RAID card.
For example WD xxEADS (and some other WD drives) are made to be run as single drive. As soon as they get read-error (which happens now and then) they start "digging" in deep-recovery in order to recover data. RAID cards don't buy this and just flag them failed as soon as they time-out (usually around 10 secs). Even worse, WD Green drives are made to be "green" and don't work well with Linux. They park the heads after 8 seconds in order to save power. Linux doesn't give s**t about being green and tickles the drive every 20 secs or so, drive ends up parking/unparking heads every 20 secs and racks up heaps of LCC events in no time. They are specced for 300000 unparks, which can be reached as soon as 1 year. Paradoxally, WD thinks that Linux should be fixed (for accessing the drive) and not their firmware.
Those parameters can be altered with utilities WDIDLE3 and WDTLER but it will viod the warranty. So unless you run single desktop PC with one drive, avoid WD consumer discs.
More info:
Time-Limited Error Recovery - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
To round it off: if you run RAID and want to be sure, use drives on list approved by manufacturer. They will usually cost more than same size consumer drives though. For pro stuff, it's FC or SAS that count's...with 5 years warranty. (but there are good SATA drives as well...just not as cheap as you are used to)
For Windows and Mac desktop and single drive only...use whatever you find best.
Regarding SSD's: there are intricate "technicalities" with SSD's. While two drives from different manufacturers might have same speed when empty, one will slow down to crawl after being used for a while and another won't. It has to do with "block erase" of flash memory.
Intel X25-M SSD's seem to be best for customer use right now. For server use, be prepared to pay triple price.