Western Digital (WD) RED NAS hard drives a Ploy?

cyanideg wrote:

Just bought 5 of these from newegg for my RNP Business Edition: HDD 2TB|WD WD20EFRX 64M OEM - Red Currently had 6 1TB discs and I needed to expand the volume. 2 of my current 2TB seagate drives have pending and reallocated sectors so it was time to expand. Installed the 1st disk, could hear the platters crunching, removed it and put in another, same issue... removed it, tried a 3rd disk, same issue. So 3/3 discs failed right out of the box Finally tried a 4th one and it booted, synced and passed SMART test. After the NAS was up with one new WD Red disc I decided to try my 5th and final drive from newegg. 5th one passed SMART data but when it was 5-10% complete syncing, the 1st WD Red drive failed and Frontview told me drive one and drive 3 were dead (both WD Red drives I just replaced.) So in a moment of panic I put both old drives back in the nas, rebooted, and thankfully the RAIDX2 volume booted. I am just finishing up transferring 4TB of data to external drives so i can buy some other drives. Newegg must have pulled these out of a garbage can. I was this close to losing all of my data. What I will do is: #1 Pay more than $108.99 for a 2TB drive and stay away from the WD Red. #2 Test each new drive on a PC by formatting long style, then testing SMART data. I cant believe out of 5 new drives, 3 failed, and the other 2 have issues (already RAW read data errors and pending bad sectors in SMART data). Im sending them back to Newegg to say the least.

Sounds like someone drop kicked your package between Newegg and your front door - unlucky.
Again, it's only anecdotal rather then significant of a pattern but I also have 4 WD Red 3TB drives running with no problems.