Pick it for raw capacity in a box that lives out of earshot, because 7,200 rpm enterprise drives are built to run flat out all day, every day. You also get five years' warranty, two more than the cheapest NAS lines. Backblaze's numbers are on its side as well, with 0.84% lifetime AFR over 2,018 drive-years and even the top of the 95% interval under the 1.38% median. It's CMR, which is what you want anywhere near a RAID or ZFS rebuild.
!Watch out for
At 7,200 rpm it's from the louder, warmer class. Fine in a cupboard, less fun on a desk.
WD's datasheet puts it at 25 dB idle and 32 dB seeking. Power draw is 5.6 W idle and 8.4 W working on WD's figures, or 49 kWh a year if it spends the whole year idling. Put four in RAID 5 and you'll have 78 TB to fill (Windows will call it 70.9 TB).
Specifications
Each value links to the Western Digital page or datasheet it came from.
Backblaze runs 6,958 of these (WDC WUH722626ALE6L4) in its data centres, and over 2,018 drive-years 17 have failed, an annualised failure rate of 0.84%. The 95% interval runs from 0.49% to 1.35%, and the whole of that sits below the 1.38% median.
Annualised failure rate and 95% interval, lifetime and the last 3 quarters (the wider the bar, the thinner the data)
AFR %
00.511.522.5
Lifetime2,018 drive-yrs0.84%0.49–1.35
Q4 20251,200 drives0.40%0.01–2.22
Q1 20263,600 drives0.80%0.22–2.05
Q2 20266,958 drives0.95%0.49–1.66
Median lifetime AFR across Backblaze drive models: 1.38%
Source: Backblaze Drive Stats, lifetime to Q2 2026. Bear in mind that's data-centre use, which is a lot harder on a drive than a home NAS will ever be.