I just purchased a newer WD Red (WD80EFAX) to replace an older HGST (pre-WD if memory serves) drive. That drive (and another of the same model I purchased elsewhere to test) is not recognized by the UEFI on the motherboard. The OS probes the drive and fails to negotiate DMA transfers.

Turns out there is a publicly available KB article that mentions known bugs with transfer rate negotiation on some of their SATA3 drives. Of course WD won't say which drives. There's even a utility referenced in the article that you can use to disable SATA3 support. But WD won't make it publicly utility.

Meanwhile their support is stuck in a "have you tried power cycling the computer" loop.

If memory serves Western Digital / HGST / SanDisk were among the first to jack up prices after the Thailand disasters. Fuck em.

Meanwhile is the difference in failure rate between Seagate and Western Digital even statistically significant? For most comparisons you're looking at a fraction of a percent.