If WD expects its drives to fail after 3 years, then WD is manufacturing shoddy products and it’s time to change vendors.

Which is a real shame, because WD was until recently the gold standard of disk drive reliability. To my recollection, I’ve never seen a WD drive fail.

I’ve got a machine whose (Seagate, not WD) drives have been powered on for 14 years and they still aren’t complaining. They’re about to, though—their SMART reports only 1% service life left!