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

Generous capacity, generous pricing, solid construction, and no tricks or wool over the eyes. There is a reason I am a lifelong Western Digital fan and buy their products almost exclusively; They are serious about their products and sell them for fair market price. Ive purchased four of these in 8 TB storage size for usage in a Synology DS418 NAS server. Set up in a RAID configuration they are quite fast for reading, average for writing, noisy but not so unbearable I cant tolerate it (I have the server located within my bedroom that I sleep in.) These run hot because of their 24/7 operation and high RPMs. Ensure you have proper active cooling to avoid shortening the drive life. While they will run at room temperature with no cooling doing so will drastically cut down on the operational lifespan and void the warranty because of improper usage. Be sure to register yours with Western Digital on their website upon delivery to get the extended warranty that comes free by default with a purchase of any of their products. While I do not have exact statistics on their reading or writing speeds I was able to upload 1 GB worth of data in about 15 seconds and using my server they have no issue streaming raw 4K footage in real time read directly from disc.

I replace my NAS drives every couple of years or so as it gets full, doubling the capacity each time. Prior to these 8TB drives I had a pair of 4TB WD reds, and before that a pair of 2TB WD greens and before that a pair of 1TB WD greens. These drives perform very well - on a par with the 4s I removed. But they make lots of strange noises, like intermittent soft buzzing, and occasional faint humming. They are noticeably noisier than the 4TB reds I replaced. But Ive been running them for almost 2 months without a hiccup. I have yet to lose a WD drive in this NAS over 7 years of 24x7 operation so I will stick with WD until that changes.

Bought this drive because I leave my computer on 24/7. So far, it is very quiet and runs as cool as my Samsung and Hitachi drives. It took less than a couple of minutes using Windows Disk feature from Administrative Tools to format and partition the drive. Since I installed it, It has been working very well without any noticeable sounds or heat issues. I was concerned about buying the other Western Digital or Seagate Hard drives due to all the negative reviews from other customers. I bought the Red Hard drive because it is made to run for long extended period of time. As of today, I am very happy with the drive. Amazon.com packed it very well which kept it from being DOA when I received it. Update: 01/07/2013 Since installing this NAS hard drive in my tower, when you boot up to restore a system image from another hard drive in your computer case, it wont recognize it. It only recognizes the NAS drive. I needed to put my system Image backup on my NAS drive to be able to be recognized during boot up or repair function of Windows 7 or 8. If you have a network, then it wont be a problem but if you dont, be aware that, at least on my computer, it will only recognize the NAS drive during boot up when it comes to restoring your backup. The NAS drive has an embedded program so that it can be used in a Network type of computer configuration but looks like it isnt meant to be installed in a Non-Networked Computer case. Update: July 2017 - This hard drive has been working 24/7/365 days since I installed it in 2012. Absolutely no problems up to now. I did have the above mentioned issues, but with Windows 10 Pro it is a NON-ISSUE about restoring your Window Backup Image from this drive. It is recognized and works perfectly. I am very happy that it has lasted for over five years without any problems. Most Hard drives usually give up the ghost in less time than this drive. I definitely will repurchase another RED WD drive for backup purposes in the future.

I have several of these drives. They have been in a windows storage pool for about a year now. No issues at all. WD makes great hard drives and stands by their product. Over the years I have purchased over 30 consumer grade hard drives. The WD drives are the only drives that worked until I decided that I wanted to take them out of service to increase the size. I know that no hard drive manufacturer is perfect, but considering that I have purchased 2 Hitachi and 2 Seagate drives... Both other brands had mechanical failures that lead to a loss of data. I would be hard pressed to go to bat for those two companies in comparison to my current WD success rate. This particular drive is really geared towards the RAID environment. I have purchased a purple drive in the past as well. I am very pleased with that drives performance as well, but I went with the WD Red drive for the bulk of my storage needs. Both WD Red and Purple have TLER. They both have 3 year warranty. Red has a listed MTBF of 1,000,000 hours and Purple is not listed. Purple is rated for 300,000 load/unload cycles vs Reds 600,000 cycles. Purple edges out Red in noise, 26 dBA vs 28 dBA while seeking. At the end of the day this drive is much more reliable in a RAID vs other WD drives. You dont want to be running a WD Green in your RAID. The reason is TLER. Without TLER your raid controller could drop the WD Green out of the RAID group when it develops a bad sector. With TLER the RAID controller will wait the necessary time allow the drive to map out the bad sector continue working. This isnt to say that with WD Red drive you will never risk a data loss even, but it will greatly decrease the risk of that event occurring. MTBF is a statistical calculation that stands for Mean Time Between Failure. One million hours is a solid time for this drive, 11.4 years. At the rate that hard drives sizes are increasing you will most likely have migrated the data from this drive to a new one well before that time comes. I highly recommend WD Red Drives.

So, I originally purchased three of these drives for a media server I was building, and my first one just died. The reader will hopefully note the complete lack of surprise in the tone of that sentence. I dont care if these are supposedly tough drives. They are hard drives, which means its not if but when they will fail. No, the reason Im giving these a 5-star rating despite a 33% failure rate after roughly 15 months of service is the the drop-dead-simple RMA process I went through to get a replacement. Because thats really what matters in situations like this. Its not whether s*** will happen, but rather how will the company handle it once it does. WD offers a 3yr warranty on their red drives, and you will almost certainly take them up on it. Heres how my experience went. My DAS (a Drobo 5D, which I LOVE, btw), reported a bad drive. After a bit of troubleshooting, I was confident it was the drive and not the server. Went to WDs web site and easily found their customer support link. I next had to create a WD Support account, which to be fair, I should have done over a year ago when I should have originally registered my drives. As it was, however, I was still able to enter the drive serial number in their online tool, have it confirm the warranty period, and issue me a RMA. I purchased a UPS shipping label through their RMA portal for a mere $5, and shipped my drive back to them. A new drive was put in the mail to me the same day it was received in the factory, all of which was easily tracked on WDs website. The only way this could have been reasonably easier is... well... I cant actually think of how they could have handled it better. My takeaways? 1. Register your drives up front, if for no other reason than for possible recall notifications, and it will make things even easier when you do need to RMA something. 2. I will (and did) gladly continue using these drives. 3. Save at least one of the boxes (with packing material) the drives originally came in to facilitate shipping. The discounted prepaid label (though them) is for 2lbs, which is exactly what everything worked out to be with the original box.

I had a HGST 3TB that got filled so ordered their 6TB recently but it was really loud that I had to return it. I searched for a quiet 6TB HDD and a lot of people mentioned WD Red series. I saw a couple of HDD noise level postings that said WD Red 8TB was the quietest but I ordered 6TB since I didnt think I needed to spend that much more money for extra space I dont really need at the moment. I knew it was 5400RPM but since I this is going to be for storing big files such as photoshop files, music, videos, photos etc., and I have SSDs and a 7200RPM HDD for software, I decided to go for it; plus the chance of a 7200RPM HDD being too loud I thought might be bigger than getting a 5400RPM HDD. I just installed the drive and the speed of file transfers from my HGST 3TB Deskstar to this WD Red 6TB is around 90-134 MB/s (saw 160 MB/s for certain files) Its really quiet as well and I would recommend this HDD for those who need big storage spaces without the HDD being loud!

Earlier this year, I took a chance purchasing Seagates new 3TB HD for media storage and it died 2 months later. Since then Ive purchased a 3TB Western Digital RED drive (I would have picked the WD BLACK, but the price difference was a deal breaker). Its not in a NAS (just in PC), and with only one month in service I can say that at this point Im pleased with the drive and its performance. Its not as noisy, and certainly runs cooler than the dead Seagate, but time will tell. UPDATE: 10-14-12 I didnt wait for the six month period to bump it to 5-star status. I didnt mention it before but the dead Seagate was in a USB external housing which is what I put this in. I almost never hear it, and while I havent been as scientific as some (holding a stop watch, etc.)I have moved many large files to/from it, and then to two other external drives (same file each time) and the RED is by far the fastest, making things less time consuming. The others leave me toe-tapping or playing solitare until the transfers are complete. I bought a 2TB, not too long ago and plan to get 2 more 3TB drives before the end of the year. Yes, the RED series has a 3-year limited warranty. UPDATE: 11-17-12 The 3TB RED and my 3, 2TB REDs are still very happy campers, on a 24/7 basis. I recently built a PC for a customer and put the 1TB RED in it (about 3 weeks ago) and they are very happy with the build, and the first comment I received was Its so quiet. Our distributor tried to sway us from using these in anything other than a NAS, remarking that they were too slow, so I did some digging around various tech sites and came up with additional info: Due to its variable speed, Western Digital upped the MTBF from 650,000 hours to 1,000,000 3 year warranty with dedicated 24/7 support WD doesnt state the actual spin-speed, merely saying its Intellipower (meaning less than 7,200rpm), and from what Ive seen most put it in the 5400 to 5900 RPM range. The Drives cache memory was upgraded from DDR to DDR2 In a test pitting RED against other brand hard drives which run at 7200 RPM, it came out in the middle of the pack on random data tranfers, however, when transferring large media files (in the 20+ GB range) the RED beat the Seagate Barracuda by 2 minutes. UPDATE 12/31/12 No problems, runs cool, streams media great. The same goes for the 2- 2TB RED label drives in use. UPDATE 02/26/13 8 months of 24/7 and still going strong (3TB), 6 months of 24/7 and still going strong (2TB). So far, everyone Ive recommended these drives to (and bought them) are also Happy Campers. Update 06/28/2013 Nothing Good, Bad, or Ugly to add to my review. The system is up 24/7 in non-desirable conditions (76-80 degrees F, usually at 60%+humidity) and quality and reliability hasnt changed a bit! I cant recall but it has to be at least a year Ive been using the RED label.

Our famaly TiVo kept getting filled quickly with all the holiday recording and other shows that everyone wanted to record. Was looking at upgrading the TiVo Roamio but the new TiVo software is not exactly great. Instead we opting in upgrading the hard drive. Process was simple and just needed torx screw driver. Removed original 500GB and replaced with 3TB. Once installed TiVo did it’s full set-up and had to configured again. If you have FiOS you will need to have the cablecard reloaded with host, prod, and card ID. Just do a chat and they can do it in about 5 minutes. Update: 12/5/19 So far it has worked with no issues and have so much recordings and only %22 full. Overall very happy with the purchase. On advise is when opening make sure to use a air duster to clean up the fan and inside of TiVo unit. It will extend the life as well ensure it runs cool. Update: 2/17/2021 The hard drive still going strong with no issues. It’s about nearly 75% full based on all the recording series set on TiVo. My 2nd TiVo with original 500GB died this week so will be replacing with 2TB. Overall very happy with purchase.

If youre looking at this review, youre probably in the market for some honkin big drives to stuff into a server or a NAS box. These Western Digital Red series drives are probably a total waste of money if youre planning to put them into a regular PC. If youre not doing a raid array of some kind, then save your money and buy the green or black series drives instead. If youre looking to set up a raid array of some sort, these are a bargain. They arent the fastest drives, but they are rated to run 24x7 serving up data! Their 3 year warranty is above the current industry standard for consumer hard drives. For my home-made FreeNAS (google it!) NAS/Server, I bought 5 WD Red drives from Adorama (purchased through Amazon) and 1 drive directly from Amazon. The one drive from Amazon came very well packaged, double boxed in what looks like a WD cardboard box with a shock absorbing cradle. Very well packaged for shipment. Honestly, Amazon has been stellar for packaging boxes for shipment. The 5 hard drives from Adorama came in a big box which clunked when it was tilted. Opening the box revealed some big plastic pillow air strips, and 5 loose smaller boxes. Inside each of the smaller boxes was a few pillows and a factory bagged hard drive. There were not enough pillows in each box to securely cushion the hard drives against rattling around, so theres a high likelihood of damage in shipment. BAD SHIPPERS! NO DONUT! Anyway, getting on to the performance of the drives... Im running 6 drives in a ZFS RaidZ2 array. They are all controlled using an IBM M1015 PCIE 8x SATA 3 controller which has been flashed to be an HBA providing JBOD to the ZFS OS. Thats a lotta acronyms! The speed of the array is quite fast... more than fast enough to saturate a gigabit network. I currently have about 5TB of data stored on the 10TB array. On to the bad stuff... One of the drives (I havent checked the serial number to see which shipper it came from) is starting to give signs of premature failure after about 70 hours of operation. During a scrub of the data pool, drive DA5 is experiencing unreadable sectors. Luckily ZFS is able to calculate the correct values for the corrupted data, and is busily recreating the data onto another part of the drive. ZFS rocks for data reliability! If the drive does turn out to be bad, I have a WD Green 3TB drive that I can put into the array as a hot swap temporarily until the failed drive can be replaced. *UPDATE* The ZFS scrub just finished, and it repaired 1.53MB of data, with no data loss. Did I mention that ZFS rocks? Warning/Advice about Data Storage: Note 1: If youre going to be using these drives, or any data storage device for that matter, make sure that you take into account that these are highly fragile and delicate devices which can be easily damaged in shipment, or just plain up and fail when you least expect it. You really need to use some sort of redundant array of drives so that if one drive fails, your data doesnt vanish. In my case, the final configuration is going to be 6 drives in a RaidZ2 (dual parity striping), which means that my data stays intact and accessible even if 2 drives fail simultaneously. Also, there is going to be a 3TB Green drive as a hot spare that can take over for any failed drive in the array. With the hot-spare, my data can survive the loss of 3 drives without losing data (as long as the failures dont happen all at the same time). Note 2: Always, always, always have a backup. In my case, I have two external 3TB USB3.0 drives which will be used only for backup purposes. Every so often, Ill backup the critical data onto the drives and stash them in my locker at work. If you dont have TrueCrypt, google it and see why your backup removable drives should be using it. If someone steals the drives, they only get the drives and not my data. Im giving 5 stars for the drives that work... 1 star for the failing drive... averages to about 4 stars score! Ill update this review once I have details on how the drives do in a week or so. Currently it aint looking too good for drive DA5!

These HDDs are excellent for use in a NAS, and preform very well in RAID configs. They are my go-to drives for any kind of backup or redundant storage option I need. HOWEVER... If you are looking to buy these drives, do NOT buy them from Amazon. Although it is convenient, the packaging is not on par. I bought 2 of them from here. When my drives arrived, I opened the box to see that there was a small piece of brown packing paper to protect my drives. Because of this, there was still at least 4 inches of space for the drives to rattle around in. Not only this, but one of the drives shipped with a box that had a broken seal, raising my suspicions even more. I thought nothing of it and attempted to deploy them into my NAS, only to find that my suspicions were correct, and both drives were dead on arrival. Returned with no problem, submitted a packaging review through Amazon, and bought them from a local computer store. Again, I highly recommend these drives (and any drive from WD), and they deserve 5 stars. However if you are planning on buying these, save yourself the potential trouble by physically going to a store and buying them, or at least buy them online from a computer store such as Newegg. Because of this experience, I cant recommend that anyone buy a mechanical hard drive of any brand, capacity, or form factor from Amazon.