Western Digital 4TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 64 MB Cache, 3.5 - WD40EFRX

Prime day deal had these at $170 each!! It was time to upgrade my NAS... again.. Replacing WD 6TB drives with 10TB drives. The 6TB drives will then migrate over to my 2nd NAS that has 2TB drives. Ive purchased eight 10TB Red Plus drives, I have been using nothing but Red drives on my NASs and I have a few. Never a problem with sound, heat or failures (knocks on wood). The 2TB Red drives have over 78,000 hours on them right now. They run 24/7 on a rack mounted APC. I believe the 6TB have over 40,000 hours. My only problem is the time it takes to rebuild the array with one drive replacement at a time. This problem is not due to the drive, but the performance of the machine, raid controller and how full they are.

The drive is old, manufactured 2017-Feb-05, but arrived quickly sealed in original packaging. At first power-on, SMART showed no errors and zero previous run time. The drive is relatively quiet - I did not take actual SPL measurements but it is more quiet (especially on head seek operations) than similar sized Seagate drives and about the same as similar sized Samsung and Toshiba drives. A full drive write and read completed without trouble. The drive is used in a hot-swap cage, powered up periodically to run backup operations, and is jostled and moved occasionally. So far no troubles.

I have two WD clouds. I have a WD EX4100 and a PR4100. Both units are 4 bays with 6 TB each. After several years of service Drive one failed in both units within a few months of each other. The model was actually WD60EFRX but I was sent WD60EFZX which is the Red Pro which is apparently WDs replacement for the older RX Red. I was skeptical but I put the disk into the bay and the rebuild went as advertised over the course of a day or so and it is as good as new and maybe a little faster as the cache is a little bigger if I am not mistaken. Interestingly, the packages I received were both labled as the RX but the actual drive was the ZX. Amazon was more than happy to do a return and made it easy as pie but I decided to keep the extra one I ordered as a spare. Although there was some mislabeling, it was not Amazons fault and all is well that ends well.

Over the years Ive purchased several WD red drives for my Synology home NAS. I started with the 4TB, then moved up to 6TB and finally 8TB. I havent had a chance to try the 10TBs yet, since the price is still up there unless you REALLY need the space (time of writing is mid-2018). But Im sure Ill get there eventually. Prior to the reds being available, I purchased many of the WD green drives (at least 7 at last count). Unfortunately, the greens were not designed for NAS use, so you had to find a Linux system to plug the drive into to change a firmware setting to disable a 300 second idle timeout... the drives idling repeatedly in a 24-hour environment after many months of use would eventually add additional wear and tear on the greens that would reduce their overall lifespan significantly. The reds were definitely a nice addition to the WD lineup, as they were the first budget drive from WD that were specifically designed for (home) NAS use... no firmware tweaks necessary. OK, enough of the history lesson. I would rate the WD green drives as being very reliable, but not perfect. I believe I received one that was DOA, which was an easy process with Amazon to ship back and replace. During many years of operation (my first green was purchased in 2009 and is still going strong today after continuous use for almost 9 years), I only had 1 drive that failed in my NAS. It disconnected from the array, which immediately degraded the RAID. The drive that failed was not the oldest drive that I owned, so I ran the SMART tests and everything came back A-OK. I let the Synology rebuild the RAID array with the failed drive, and everything seemed to be working for a couple of months... until it disconnected again. This was a good indication that it was time to replace the drive, which I did. OK, so Ive had a pretty good history with WD drives. Getting back to the reds, I own at least 6 of them in various capacities. First, let me say that none have ever failed outright or caused any data loss in my system, so overall their track record is great. However, both of the 6TB reds that Ive purchased have had multiple disk re-identification events in my NAS. These re-identification events have not caused any data loss, nor do they require a rebuild of the RAID array. Synology says that re-identification events are an early warning sign that the drive could fail, so to keep an eye on these events to see if theyre increasing in frequency... if so its probably time to replace the drive(s) to avoid any potential data loss. On both of my 6TB reds, Im averaging about 1 disk re-identification event every 12 to 18 months, so Im not overly concerned. Ive never seen any strange events (re-identification, re-connection, bad sectors, etc.) on any of the 4TB or 8TB reds that I own, so this problem seems to be specific to the 6TB model (or its a huge coincidence). My 6TB reds were purchased in 2014 and 2015, so its possible that whatever was causing the issue was corrected. I have the 6TB reds loaded into a backup NAS, but I will personally not be purchasing any more of them. YMMV. Overall Im giving these drives 4 stars. If possible, Id give 3 stars to the 6TB reds (simply due to the anxiety factor), and 5 stars to the other reds (well, at least the 4TB and 8TB, which Ive had personal experience with), but Amazon does not allow for split review ratings.

I have been around computers since the mid 80s and remember purchasing my first hard drive. It was for my Apple II in an enclosure about half the size of the computer with a self-contained power supply, fans and all sorts of what were then, goodies. It was an SCSI drive and it had a whopping 25 megabytes of space at my disposal. The hard drive was a Shugart, named after the fellow that built them and the predecessor of what is today, Seagate. There was a period of time in the 90s where my experiences with what were then the kingpins of hard drives, WD and Seagate simply did not prove reliable in a server or NAS environment which is why I always ended up paying top dollar for SCSI servers and enterprise drives that were significantly more expensive than an equivalent ATAPI desktop drive. When Samsung introduced their line of desktop drives, for the first time I felt comfortable using them in a server environment where they run 24/7. Today, after testing hard drives as they come out in both sizes and formats, I found that by far, WD has the best NAS drives for the money and they are not that much more expensive than a regular desktop drive. In fact, the WD Black line, which is intended for desktops is also a terrific drive and would not hesitate to stick them in a NAS box with one from their Red line. But I say so only from the point of view of reliability. As in the past I often found that anyone selling a non scuzzy drive claimed they were purpose built for a server environment, I questioned it as it seemed that I could not see any tangible evidence of them being anything more than the same drive as any other with a different label and a higher price. I can quantify the difference even between a WD Black drive and the Red NAS line. The transfer speeds are higher and they dont run nearly as hot which explains their great longevity under enterprise environment. There are still good reasons for going with enterprise scuzzy drives if that is what you need and can afford it. But for the everyday person that simply wants to keep their data backed up off site or off their PC, the WD Red line is a terrific drive and deliver a lot of bang for the buck. I presently have a location where I run 10 NAS boxes with two to four hard drives each and over time, the WD Red drives have outlasted Seagates equivalents -- by a long shot. That is not meant to be a put down of Seagate because I use their hybrid drives on my desktops and they are terrific. I personally prefer them to WDs Black line even though I know they are also great drives. I must admit that I am baffled when I read about someone these days getting, say, 4 new drives and one or two being DOA. Maybe Ive been fortunate, but I have purchased hundreds if not thousands of hard drives and I have yet to get one tha was DOA. Some clearly perform better than others and last longer than others, but as a whole, I would say the hard drive market is extremely mature and whether they are made in China or the US, makes no difference. All I can say is that in my experience and for my needs, the WD Red line is an excellent NAS drive and will continue to use them in the foreseeable future. Something else may come out that it is better or not. But when one is dealing with a NAS environment, there isnt much room for testing new equipment if the one I use now meets my needs and has proven itself. As my needs change, I will go through due diligence in determining what will be best. But at least presently, there are alternatives to SCSI if you do not need it and the prices per megabyte are lower than ever. I highly recommend this line of drives from WD for its intended use.

The 8TB drives I have received arrived on time and work fine. They also appear to be CMR technology. If you are considering any other size (less than 8TB in the WD RED product line) for used in a NAS or any RAID configuration, I suggest you google SMR vs CMR. I will not try to explain SMR, other than saying, it is designed to perform well under light load. Many users are complaining about performance of SMR drives in NAS devices during array rebuilds (whenever you extend/expand/replace drives in an array). I have not had a problem with the 8TB drive I purchased, but I did have another SMR drive that failed during a rebuild. Infact the SMR drive that appeared to fail, tested fine when it was removed from the array but under the heavy load of a rebuild the drive was performing so poorly that the system thought it had failed. At the time I am writing this, the WD RED 2 - 6 TB drives appear to be SMR based. The WD RED 8TB and all the WD RED Pro appear to be CMR.

We bought two WD 3TB Reds to go in a Synology DS213 NAS. The drive installed as drive one in a modified Raid 1 array that Synology calls SHR has been fine in the month or more its been running. The second drive crashed after a week. I elected to return it to Western Digital for replacement under their Advance Replacement program, whereby they ship the new drive, and one simply returns the defective drive in that packaging. There are several kickers. One is that they put a hold on a credit card until they get the old drive returned, and its for $250- much more than the going price on Amazon, so be sure to return it within the 30 days given. The other caveat is that shipping the old drive back is on you. That will currently run $15 insured to return the drive UPS. Anyhow, I promptly received the replacement drive, installed it (this is extremely easy in the Synology NAS), and lo and behold, although it ran normally it would not pass the extended S.M.A.R.T. test. I notified WD, and they asked if I wanted to replace it. I stated that I did not if it meant I was going to have to pay for shipping a second time. They sent me a new drive (that had been pre-tested) plus a prepaid return shipping label. This new drive is installed and running fine. The WD Red series is designed to run in NAS applications, and presumably it does. I give the highest marks here to Western Digital for how the problem I had was handled. All manufactured products have a certain number of defective units, nobody can do anything about that. The real test of a manufacturer is how they deal with such issues, and that went very well in my case.

These work well in my QNAP TS-451 NAS setup. Have two 3TB drives in raid 1. Quiet and cool, no problems whatsoever yet. I did notice that even though I have recent firmware on the drives, the load cycle count was still going up: Even though my drives came set to 300 seconds, here were my stats for each drive after 3 months: ~6000 LCC over 1451 hours ~= a load cycle every 900 seconds These drives are supposed to be rated for 300,000 LCC, so 300,000/6000 * 1451 hours = 8 years 8 years aint too bad, (Id probably replace the drives in that time) but it really doesnt provide much buffer. I reasoned that I am still happily using a 1TB drive from 2009 (6 years ago) and expect to for another couple years. So in the end I decided to just disable it for now. Since I didnt have a external SATA enclosure compatible with drives of terabyte size, I had to find a wdidle binary compiled for my NAS. Once I did, disabling the load cycle feature was easy: ------------------------ Move the program to the NAS and make it executable: macbook_computer$ scp idle3ctl [email protected]:/root xxx@xxxxs password: idle3ctl 100% 14KB 14.2KB/s 00:00 [~] # chmod +x idle3ctl [~] # ./idle3ctl -V idle3ctl v0.9.1 ---------- Find your drives locations: [~] # fdisk -l /dev/sd? Disk /dev/sda: 3000.5 GB, 3000592982016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 364801 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 267350 2147483647+ ee EFI GPT Disk /dev/sdb: 3000.5 GB, 3000592982016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 364801 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1 267350 2147483647+ ee EFI GPT ... ------ Check the current values: [~] # ./idle3ctl -g105 /dev/sda [~] # ./idle3ctl -g105 /dev/sdb (both said 300 seconds) ------- disable both (can do just one to test first): [~] # ./idle3ctl -d /dev/sda [~] # ./idle3ctl -d /dev/sda -------- reboot (I rebooted from the web UI) and check again: [~] # ./idle3ctl -g105 /dev/sda Idle3 timer is disabled [~] # ./idle3ctl -g105 /dev/sdb Idle3 timer is disabled -------- In the end I wouldnt let the LCC feature sway you one way or the other. Its been fixed to an acceptable timer setting now, and in many cases is probably useful. I just disabled it to be safe so I can get hopefully 8+ years out of these drives.

The perfect expandable storage option for my PS4. My gaming library is pretty massive and it can be a hassle waiting for a title I want to play to finish downloading. This is a convenient workaround with the enclosure I bought.

I purchased 2 of these for an MD MyCloud Ultra2EX NAS to substitute a Synology DS220 fitted with 2 Seagate Ironwolf drives that deleted a weeks worth of work without reason or warning. Given that I dont know if the problem was the Synology or the Ironwolf drives, I just substituted everything. I transferred all the files from the Synology/Ironwolf to the MyCloud/WD Red Plus and the response time side by side (connected to the same router and even plugged onto on the same power strip was noticeable faster with these WD Red Plus drives than the Ironwolf ones. Im sticking to WD...I have tried 4 different times to give other brands the chance to prove me wrong, but they fail every single time. This last fiasco will make me a WD devote for as long as they keep this quality ethic.