Western Digital 16TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5 - WD161KFGX

This is a review for a drive that was purchased from Amazon and fulfilled by Amazon. I received a new drive in new (sealed) packaging. It was exactly as expected. I was able to verify the 5-year warranty with Western Digital and register in online. I have installed it in my system and it is working correctly so far. Should that change, I will update this review. I cant speak for other sellers in the marketplace, but as I stated... I got from Amazon exactly what I ordered.

I purchased a pair of these on Black Friday 2021 well in advance of when I would actually need to use them. They sat on my shelf unopened in their original boxes for over 3 months. When I went to install and use them, one drive was OK. (I have a pair of media servers with 24 large drives in them) The other drive was riddled with errors, would not format and made any machine it was connected to unstable. This is a BRAND NEW DRIVE WITH ZERO HOURS ON IT!!! Because of my own stupidity I did not test them when I got them. Now for that mistake I can only get my new drive replaced with a used refurbished drive. It gets worse. I have had TREMENDOUS trouble getting into my Western Digital account and receiving information from Western Digital. I guess Western Digital is an Indian or Pakistan company. I cannot understand these people. I have spent days and days and more days on the phone just trying to get an RMA. I sent the drive to California where it was received and has sat for 4 weeks. Western Digital does not even show they received my drive yet and that they are still waiting for it. I called them on the phone and they looked it up and promised to update things. Nothing has happened in a further 2 weeks. It is my conclusion that Western Digital warranties are worthless. I wasted $400 on one of drives and the alternative drive company is even worst than this.

As an IT professional, I have replaced my share of hard drives and I was impressed to say that of all the drives I have replaced over a 20 year period of bring in IT, I only have replaced 3-4 failed Western Digital drives. And all of these were 5-11 years old. They ran a good life. Today for the first time ever, I received a DOA WD drive. The worst part is that it was one of their professional top of the line drives, a WD Red Pro! What a let down this was. I have lost a lot of confidence on WD after this experience and can no longer blindly recommend them. Its now worth looking at the competition before making a decision. I still have more bad than good experiences with WD, but getting a DOA Pro drive is not ok.

Having a synology NAS, I know to test drives first before installing now as it creates a nightmare if you get a bad drive when trying to rebuild an array. Arrived sealed, although not a tight seal, so who knows but it gives a little bit of peace of mind.

My laptop didt find the HDD. Went to Disk management and did some adjustments later laptop detected

WD Red drives are no stranger to me. I own many of these drives and have never had any issues, until this 20tb version. This drive was very noisy. Despite being formatted but literally empty this drive spins up and down all the time and had a weird vibration noise to it - in a grindy sort of way. None of my other red drives, even after years of service have this issue. Perhaps I got a bad one...

These are the only drives I will ever use for my NAS. Rock solid.

Over the past 2 years I have bought 8 of the WD Red Pro and 4 of the WD purple drives off Amazon. Of the 12 in total only one has been DOD. Checking my cameras the one that was dead on delivery was found to have been chucked 10ft across my porch to the door by the Amazon driver. My advice to you, make sure you can be home to greet the driver and you will have some great drives.

These drives make a constant ticking noise once every 5 seconds. This seems to be a feature of the drive, as they continuously proactively scan the media for bad sectors and relocate them before they become unreadable. This in itself is a good thing. What is bad is excessively audible noise this creates. Sitting anywhere close to these hard drives, the periodic clockwork nature of these clicks, every 5 seconds from each drive, it becomes very annoying real fast. I expected 7200 rpm drives to be have more white noise than 5400 rpm drives. Thats fine. A bit louder random head movements while drive is being accessed, I can get used to that. However, I did not expect these to click like a very loud antique clock all day long even when completely idle. If you are buying hard drives for a datacenter, these are probably great. If you are buying them for a NAS box that youll keep far away from sight (and ears) in a separate room in a basement, these should do just fine. If theyll be anywhere near you while you work, constant ticking clock-like noise from these will start driving you nuts real fast.

First things first. This 2TB Red Pro drive is CMR (not SMR) technology, which is a relief. In any event, I installed these drives (2 of them) in my quite old, Synology DS211 NAS and thus far have had no issues at all. Pretty happy with them. I havent done any performance testing and this is just an occasional use device, largely for archival storage. I did upgrade to Synology DSM 6.2, no problems there either. All the drive features seem to work including sleep mode and S.M.A.R.T and other drive management technologies. Im mostly happy these drives were not SMR, that was my biggest concern. As far as noise, when these drives are spinning they are pretty darn quiet... literally cant hear them at less than 3 feet from my head. They do make some interesting noises when going into sleep/wake mode however.. very bizarre sounds. Vibration seems non-existent as well. I did have some older WD drives in this NAS for almost 8 years and they seemed to occasionally have some harmonics, these new Red Pro 2TB drives dont seem to have that issue at all. Good luck!