WD Red - how many hours before replacing?

I have twelve WD Red 3tb drives in three OWC Thunderbay enclosures. Six of the drives are for photo storage…I am a photographer…and the other three are backups for the six primary drives. Backup occurs daily via Carbon Copy Cloner. The drives, when my Imac is not resting, are running full time. I use Softraid but not for RAID but, rather, to keep track of the health of the drives. I got a warning from Softraid recently that two of the drives would most likely fail within the next 90 days so I replaced them. But the others are all in good condition as are the two replacements. I did note, however, that most of the drives have 18,000 hours on them. I was recently told to replace the drives by the time they reach 20,000 hours. Is this so? I thought WD Red drives had a much longer life.

Sounds like something a Salesperson would say. $$

a Hard drive should last longer than 2 Years.

Personally, i keep backups of everything and replace a hard drive when it actually fails … not when someone or something predicts or fortune tells me when it will.

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