Hello everyone 
,
In August 2011 I’ve bought nine brand new WD RE4 WD1003FBYX. Disks were purshared in IT wholesale, were originally wrapped in foil and well packed. I’ve installed those disks in three, brand new Xeon based servers (everything manufacterued in 2011).
-
Disks were dedicated to store static content, without high load.
-
All disks were well cooled - max. about 30-35 Celsius degrees on each.
-
The controller used was Intel(R) 5 Series/3400 Series SATA AHCI Controller (integrated on motherboard) and LSI Logic SAS1064ET.
-
RAID level was not set - disks were working stand alone.
After about 20-40 hours I’ve noticed that the following S.M.A.R.T. attribute - C8 - Write error rate (also known as Multi Zone error rate) - has values from 1 to 4 on all disks.
I have to say, that I was shocked: I use WD RE drives for 6 years and I never noticed any problem. I’ve run WD Diag Quick and Extended tests, they passed, but it did’nt reassured me. I’ve checked on the net and read that this attribute is related to plate or heads problems. I’ve also read, that in case of mission critical systems I should replace the drive. OK, I’ve RMA-ed all drives, got brand new ones, and, guess what… same problem!
I was very upset 
, I RMA-ed all disks again and received cash return.
About 4 months later (December 2011) I decided to try again. Maybe it was bad batch or whatever. I’ve bought two WD RE WD2503ABYX, again brand new, well packed. And guess what happened…
I am lost now. I really need reliable, enterprise class drives. I have a lot of old WD RE, RE2 and RE3 drives without any distressing values in S.M.A.R.T., even in disks with >45 000 hours uptime. What happened to RE4 series?
Also the interesting fact is that when, in the past, I bought brand new WD RE/RE2/RE3 drives, they had about 40-50 hours uptime, which indicated on “each drive is put through extended burn-in testing with thermal cycling to ensure reliable operation.”. To my suprise, brand new WD RE4 drives have 0 hours of uptime, which puts question mark on above ensureing.
I read on WD Community forum a lot of posts about dropping from RAID and other issues, and even those guys confirms that there were no problems with RE3, but RE4 are bleep.
Has anyone such or simillar problems?
Please help me with this problems, I believe that the solution is important not only for me, but also for other users.
Thank you very, very much 
Michael
