Heh I personally never had a Black fail on me. I have about 25 Black drives (some are 10+ years old and they only have a few reallocated bad sectors), I also have 6 Red drives, 8 RE drives and 1 Blue drive. The only WD drives that have failed on me were 2 Greens and 1 Blue. That's 2/2 for my Greens and 1/2 for my Blues. They failed in less than 3 years and all 3 of them were replaced with Blacks.
Intellipower drives are more succeptible to failure from my experience as they use weaker motors. Fixed 7200rpm drives are far more sturdy.
RE drives imho are a must for hardware RAID controllers. These drives are dogs. They never fail. One of mine is 8 years old and its SMART data is as clean as it was brand new.
Red drives are fine for low-cost hardware RAID solutions.
Blacks are better suited for all-around single drive or JBOD storage.
Greens and Blues are budget drives unfortunately.
If failure probability is of concern to you, my personal suggestion would be to go with SATA2 RE drives. Their cost is at the same level with Reds and Blacks. But their craftsmanship/durability is far superior (their target market is Enterprise where data reliability is the first concern). Also SATA2 to SATA3 there's absolutely no difference in performance. All you gain by SATA3 is faster cache (mechanical drives have a cap in speed) which should not matter at all for storage drives. Have in mind RE SATA2 is faster than Red SATA3 anyhow heh (due to Red being Intellipower).
You'll notice in my signature that I use SATA2 RE drives in RAID5 for storage on my main development system (
3x WD2003FYYS 2TB RE4).
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