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

Ive got 4 of these running in RAIDZ1 in a TrueNAS Core machine I keep at my house as a backup to the main TrueNAS Core box I keep at my parents place. Theyve been running continuously for almost a year now, 312 days or 7492 hours. In that time, not a single error or fault has developed. All 4 drives were purchased right here and are in warranty through WD. No third-party OEM shenanigans here, at least for me I actually bought these right before the whole SMR debacle hit. These drives, the WD40EFRX were listed as the older model compared to the newer WD40EFAX. They were cheaper at the time too so I went for these instead of the newer drive which, upon first glance at the time, only had a smaller amount of cache. Wasnt worth the extra money because I was using these in RAIDZ with a large amount of RAM anyway. So, whatever I thought...boy did I luck out! The WD40EFRX is now listed as a WD Red Plus drive. Plus indicating its CMR instead of regular Red SMR drives. Newer isnt always better! - PSA: DO NOT BUY WD RED SMR DRIVES FOR USE IN A ZFS or HARDWARE RAID ENVIROMENT. YOU WILL HAVE PROBLEMS IF YOU HAVE TO REBUILD AN ARRAY AFTER DISK FAILURE. Purchase a CMR drive instead for this use case -

I just got a couple of these 3TB WD Red drives a week ago! If you want some nice drives for your NAS these are it! Recommended for 1 to 5 drive bay systems. My new NAS has 4 bays so Im using 2 of them right now. Formatted you get 2.7TB from them! You want a HDD that is guaranteed to support a NAS, these WD Red drive are them!!! The are Basically Green drives and yet so much more! They are much faster yet use less Power then other drives and have less heat. They also have a 3 year warranty and their own phone number to call if you have any problems. So the little higher price is worth the longer warranty of these over the other drives. These have software designed to work in a NAS environment that other HDD can have issues with! NASs are a fast growing market right now I think. Since they need Hard Drives, Im surprised WD is the only ones out with these RED NAS drives. Im sure others are working on their own versions for this growing market. If you want to sell HDDs, especially the 3.5 ones, because Laptops and whatnot is the growing market and they take 2.5 drives or going with SSD drives. Both of my drives worked problem free. Just mounted to the frames and popped them into my NAS and the NAS did the rest on its own. Simple easy!!! Lower power saves you money in electricity over the years using it and less heat means longer lasting drives! How can you go wrong? So how do these really stack up in Comparison to other HDD? Well when it comes to Hardware Reviews everyone knows anandtech.com right! Check it out. [...] Toms Hardware is also another great review site. Check out their review of these Red drives! [...] Update 5-21-2013 Ive now had these 2 WD Red 3TB drives for a number of months and so far theyve been working out great in my NAS unit. In fact I just ordered a 3rd one just now as I have room for up to 4 drives. If you have a NAS, THESE are the drives to get. Dont even waste your time on the 1 and 2 Gig versions, get these 3 Gig REDs!!! Ill see how it works out with my NAS as it goes from RAID 1 to Raid 5 mode. Itll be nice to have some breathing room again with this 3rd HHD.

I ordered 3 of these back in October of last year to use in my HTPC. Recently I was running out of space and ordered another one along with 3 - 4TB Greens for a backup solution. Upon reading up about the greens, which I had never ordered before, I learned about WDs WDIDLE3 utility that some people are using to set the Head Park timer from 8 seconds to 5 minutes and thus reducing the amount of times the heads park. Since the Greens are only rated at 300k cycles, you could see how quickly those would add up of they are parking every 8 seconds after use. On a whim, I decided to check the new Red drive I just purchased to see what its timer was set to, it was 5 minutes. I then checked the Red drives I purchased here from Amazon back in October of last year, the same 4TB model as the one I just ordered. To my surprise, all 3 were set to 8 seconds and my head park count was already at 18k in a matter of months. I used the utility and set those to 5 minutes as well. Performance of the drive was not really what I bought them for, but they seem to be fine. Their not Black drives and 7200 RPMs, so their not as quick as what I have in my gaming machine, but they work just fine for my HTPC.

I am an absolutely new user of this particular drive. I had five of the 3tB version in my Drobo 5N and, believe it or not, I was running out of protection space and the Drobo complained that the #1 drive should be replaced with something larger. I couldnt find a 5tB WD Red so I bought the 6tB and when the budget recovers Ill buy a second to actually gain a bit of actual storage space. For Drobo users, sticking one of these in the enclosure might be intimidating. 1) the hardware will be slow to recognize and initialize the drive so the indicator will stay red for some time -- be patient 2) even after the Drobo acknowledges the new drive it may be a few minutes before it starts the rebuild and 3) the most scary thing is the Drobos estimate of rebuild time; dashboard started out estimating 251 hours and then jumped to 299 hours(!) but then settled down to 20 hours after maybe 45 minutes of running and then quickly dropped to 17. Way more reasonable. (later) Well, after approximately 26 hours the data rebuild on the Drobo 5N completed with no complaints from the new 6tB WD Red drive. Of course this means that I will now need to buy a second equivalent drive to install because the Drobo, for its data protection scheme to work its magic, needs to have a #2 drive as large as the #1 to make use of the space. In other words, to gain 3tB of actual extra storage over what I had to begin with (5 X 3tB Red drives) I will need to expand to two 6tB drives along with three 3tB. Maybe I really should consider erasing some media files and keeping fewer hot backups... (later still) A month has gone by since I put the first of these 6tB drives into my Drobo 5N and my computer budget recovered enough to allow me to buy a second drive. With Drobos storage algorithms, adding the first drive didnt actually yield any increased storage but with the second addition I finally got an extra 3tB of storage. Again, the drive was thrashed pretty well in the 16+ hour data rebuilding process and everything went well. Im still impressed with WDs Red and Green drives with 10 or so of them in use the performance has been flawless. With two 6tB and three 3tB drives in the Drobo Im hoping that my server storage needs will be taken care of for a while. With all of these drives in the tiny Drobo 5N the operating temperature is good despite the small cooling fan and the fan noise is probably the loudest thing about the entire device.

I trust my music, movie, and picture collections on these. I have a few of these. One of them is over a year old and I have had no issues with it at all. Ive bought many hard drives and have had many failures from all of the big brand names including WD, Seagate, Toshiba, etc.. I admit, I push my hard drives to the limits. They are often on 24/7 and are running because I also run a server through them. I should probably upgrade to data base/enterprise drives but so far these have outstood all of the other drives I have used. I often experience failures on newer drives within the first 6 months because off the high usage they get. I run a hard drive program to keep an eye out now on my drives (HD Sentinel). Ive noticed the drives that I have that are not NAS approved are down to a health rating of just fair, while my current NAS drive that I bought around the same time is in excellent condition. All my NAS drives are in a MediaSonic ProBox enclosure and they seem to get plenty of cooling power to never have to worry about heat.. and the enclosure never jumps into a higher fan speed then the lowest setting so they must be producing hardly any heat themselves. From now on Ill forget about spending any money on anything less then a NAS drive. I feel secure again about where my data is stored and dont have to worry about failing drives like I have for so often before. The drives are faster then I thought. Dont let the 5400 RPM speed fool you. These drives can easily stream 4k content without a glitch. Super fast accessing time as well. I highly recommend these drives.

The reviews Ive read on this drive seem to praise how quiet it is. A review on techreport.com even stated, The WD Red 4TB is remarkably quiet; it emanates a faint hum while idling, and its seek chatter is barely audible from a few inches away.. I would agree that they are quiet while idling, but I have to say that as far as the seek chatter goes, this is not what I have experienced. I purchased 2 4TB drives from Amazon to put in my QNAP TS-251+ NAS. During certain times like booting up, launching certain apps, and copying file, I can hear the seek chatter from 10-15 feet away. In comparison, I have a 3TB WD My Passport drive that I would definitely say is quiet. I cant hear any noticable seek chatter from that even when Im right next to it. To put some proof behind what I was hearing, I put a decibel meter about 6 away from the NAS. The increase between when the drive was just iding and when it was seeking was on average about 5 dB with a peak around 7-8 dB. For those not familiar with the decibel scale, an increase of 10 dB means it is twice as loud. I decided to exchange the drives for 2 others, and unfortunately those sound just like the first 2 that I received. All 4 of the drives were manufactured in Oct 2015. Now Im not saying that its really loud, just that it is louder than I was led to believe it would be, especially since the 3TB WD Passport drive I have is not like this at all. So there are only 2 things I can conclude from this: 1. This seek chatter noise is normal for these drives and my expectations were just too high. (And maybe the NAS enclosure is amplifying the sound a bit) 2. I have bad luck and I have stumbled across a noisy batch of drives

So I recently got a Synology RAID NAS drive and used two WD Reds from an old Firewire WD RAID. Unfortunately, a power loss bricked one of the drives and I decided to replace it with the exact same model a WD Red of the same size to make sure no issues when I replace the bad drive. This sort of works out in that the other Reds were quite old, maybe over 5 years so replacing one with a brand new one is probably a good thing. Drive came in non-descript packaging. Easy to replace and Synology was able to repair without issue. Had my kid destroy the old drive by taking it apart and taking all kinds of tools to the disks. Like the WD brand, though some of the Synology techs recommended a different brand. Ill probably go with their recommendation if I decided to expand. BTW, Synology products are really awesome - love their tools, apps, and technical support.

Just bought 2 drives advertised as Used: Like New | Details Sold by TechnoDealsUSA These drive pass all the S.M.A.R.T test but they have both be run for 48,000+ hours virtually non stop. That is over 5.5 years. I would not exactly call them Like New. I only saved about 20% buying used over new. I hope I dont regret this.

Ordered 4 of these to make a RAID10 array to hold my iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie libraries. I had those libraries on a single Lacie external HDD via Thunderbolt and that failed right after the 3 year warranty expired. That wasnt catastrophic because I have multiple backups, but this gave me the excuse to use a RAID10 setup. I wanted the RAID10 for 2 reasons: 1. Ease of failure recovery 2. increased speed. Looked at a lot of drives and the WD Reds seemed to fit the bill. I also ordered an OWC Thunderbay 4 RAID Thunderbolt 2 enclosure to put them in. Nice combo. The speed of these drives seems right in line with what I expected. Heres what I measured with Blackmagic on my 2011 iMac through a TB cable: Single drive: 146 Mbps RAID0 x 4 drives: 560 Mbps (that was cool) RAID1 x 2 drives: 141 Mbps RAID10 x 4 drives: 286 Mbps That all seems to line up with expectations. There are probably faster single drives out there that push closer to 165+ Mbps, but this works for what I need. If I really want more speed Ill just put 4 SDDs in there and let er rip @ 1 Gbps. What made me giggle is that the internal drive on my iMac runs at 96 Mbps, so my external RAID10 is faster than the internal drive. I guess they made slower drives way back in 2011. Hope they hold up well but if they dont I wont have any down time.

TLDR: it works as expected and theres nothing more reassuring than that especially when its at this price point. I tried buying from Amazon. I got it after a couple of weeks which is pretty fast since its international shipping after the holidays. Plugged it in and it was detected immediately without problems and works as expected and specs are as specified in WD website. The one I bought locally was just a brick. Cant get detected so its useless. I should have just bought from Amazon instead of buying from a local unknown seller.