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

Drives dont fail a lot but some due. I was the lucky one to get a drive with an IO device error. I had to wait 1 month for my replacement drive (I selected standard). To my astonishment, I received an used drive.........with IO device error (impossible to format, clean, initialize). This is when I found out that WD ALWAYS RETURNS REFURBISHED DRIVES FOR RMA. Not the ideal business model in my humble opinion, as they use the drives from other RMA returns. WD claims that the drives go through extensive testing, but so did the defective drive they send me after my RMA claim. Now I escalated the issue to WD management and insisted they send me a new drive (they offered a higher capacity refurbished model, no thx). WD mgt approved this and to my great surprise received a disk with marks on the front plate, again a used drive. The disk passed all test I could possibly run on it, but writing speeds were in KB/s range (yes I did check on different slots on my server and different computers for SATA connection issues). The likeliness that you will get an inferior product is high, logically as they use recovered RMA drives. This is such a bad business policy, trying to save a couple of $$ on dissatisfied customers. I still cant wrap my mind around it. I was not going to go through this again or gamble on a 4rth drive being perfect. Raised the issue to Amazon and they refunded the money. Customer Obsession works at Amazon for sure not WD. I honestly think the issue is that terrible service center in Calexico. They never kept my RMA statuses updated, I had to insist several times on updates, they test the drives poorly (which I think is a fair claim) and I assume poorly executed the instructions on sending a new drive and took what they had on stock for my case. Once you have to deal with them, you are in a BAD position! SHOULD YOU CLAIM A RMA TRY TO GET YOUR MONEY BACK AND NOT A REPLACEMENT DRIVE SO YOU CAN BUY A NEW DRIVE. IF THAT DOENST WORK INSIST ON A NEW DRIVE. IF THAT DOESNT WORK CONTACT AMAZON AND GET A REFUND. ------------------------ WD SUPPORT STATEMENT WD’s replacement Product under its limited warranty will be manufactured from new and serviceable USED parts. PS why 2 stars? I wanted to give a higher rating, as I also own a 30EFRX and a 60EFAX which run like a dream. The 30FRX is very reliable disk check backblaze. But 3x a faulty drive? One star would not be fair.

I use this in my custom built PC for storing large file and backups of videos/photos/etc and it has served me well. I have only filled up 1.97 TB of it and still have quite a lot of room left to store on it which is a huge plus as I plan on using it for a VERY long time. Be aware that this is not a hard drive meant for games or applications that need to read or write to the hard drive very quickly. This HDD spins at 5400 RPM which is about 2000 RPM short of regular consumer drives that can handle those applications/games much better. This is a large storage drive meant to store things in a large storage environment. That being said, I am a little let down by one of the features. This drive will automatically power-off (spin down) after a certain amount of idle. This means that if you want to access files on the drive, you will need to wait for it to spin back up. Dont get me wrong, it is no more than ~5 seconds, but that can be bad for hard drives as constantly spinning back up is not good for the disks or head. I would still recommend this drive to anyone that needs a large amount of storage on a reliable disk. Seagate just doesnt cut it and their price-to-performance ratio proves it. WD is the only brand I trust for hard drives.

Usually love WD, disappointed it died a few days after Amazons 30 day warranty and they wont even consider it. We are talking 3 days... Will try to get a replacement through WD but there are already warnings on WDs site that they are behind in replacing drives..... Update: 5/18 - WARNING WARNING WARNING.... Western Digital is claiming these are OEM drives (even though it isnt listed anywhere in their description) and WILL NOT HONOR A WARRANTY. Buy at your own risk because they will not replace it!!!!!!!! Very disappointed in Western Digital and these dirty tactics and Very disappoint in AMAZON for allowing the Bait & Switch- False Advertising!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Update 5/19 - Western Digital says my drive is OEM and made in 2014. So they are selling 9 year old drives as new and not OEM. Amazon allows them to continue this fraud. Amazon wont stand behind the product that failed 32 days in. Western Digital wont replace it because of the OEM. And the Seller claims they cant replace it because Amazon has all their stock. DO NOT BUY THIS!!!! SCAM

Purchased WD Red 4TB in 2016. I did not use it much for the first year or two. Early this year, I started using this drive a lot. I am using as an external drive in a USB 3.1 cradle for backups and short term storage of large (20GB to 100GB files). I appreciate the low vibration; other drives in the same cradle can cause resonate vibration of other things on my desk; this drive is almost silent and vibration free. I am getting all of the expected performance; no degradation from not having a direct SATA III connection. Operating temp is very good; it seldom gets above 40c, even after long periods of high activity. Other people have commented on warranty issues. While I have never had a problem with these drives, I did look up the warranty status on WDs website recently. They correctly reported that the warranty had just expired after my three years of ownership. In 2016, I paid about $150 for the 4TB model. I considered that a decent price. Earlier this year, I started looking for a new 4TB drive. At that time, this drive was about $115. I spent a week or two looking at refurb enterprise ;evel 4TB models. They go for about $80, and the quality and warranty are really hit or miss. Now, this drive in the 4TB size is down to $100. At that price, for exactly the same drive that I know and trust, it is hard to consider any other option than another WD Red 4TB. Make sure you purchase your drive from Amazon and not an Amazon market place seller. Check your warranty status as soon as you receive your drive and return it if WD does not recognize the full three years you are entitled to. If you compare price to size in the WD Red line, you will see that the 4TB size is by far the most economical. I am going to buy a second drive for general use. If the current pricing holds, I am going to buy six more of these to replace all of the drives in my ZFS system over the next year.

Why 4 Stars instead of 5? The fact is that every mechanical hard drive will eventually fail depends on the usage and its manufacturing process control. However I can say these are the second most reliable drives. The at first place is HGST no doubt. If you are budget conscious, these are the best. I recommend to have same series drives in your NAS to get best performance and reliability. I was in habit to have a different capacity of the drives with multiple manufacturerers and ended up with frustration and no data loss thanks to the data protection and parity of the volume. I started to build my NAS with a set of 2x2TB drives and over time I increased my storage to 10TB with the same drives. Ill stick with 2TB drives to expand my storage until WD will stop manufacture not due to the fact that these are the cheapest, it is due to the fact of the existing set of drives. Im not even expecting any drive will last long as 5 years. The first set of drives which I bought is now surpassed more than three and half year and no bad sectors yet. Although Ill be expecting the first failure of the drive within a year. At the end, I say I didnt made a bad decision.

Ive had my WD Red for going on 4 years now. No problems, no corrupted sectors, no additional noise. It goes every day and every year without any problems. Solid recommendation from me!

Excellent Drives. Ive been running a variety of WD Red, Green, and Seagate Archive Drives for the better part of several years, and I thought that I would share some useful advice for things to watch out for when buying new drives, and detecting infant mortality. First thing to look for is to observe the packaging the drive arrives in. It is industry practice to ship one or more drives in boxes that are made to perfectly fit the drive. Inside the box, the drive should be suspended with two plastic holders. These holders suspend the drive and dampen any drops the package may experience during transit. (Bulk orders (15+) may be shipped in a single larger box with foam cut-out arrays). Secondly, when installing the drives, make sure that your hands are clean. Give them a wash, or better yet, wear gloves. Avoid transferring finger/hand oil to the drives so that hot-spots arent created. Thirdly, once the drives are installed, give them a full, long format. You can run 1, 3, 5, (or even more) passes on the disks. This ensures that every single sector of the drives gets written to. Once the format is complete, look up the SMART data, and check the values for anything alarming. If a drive suffered damage in shipping, now is when it may be noticeable. Compare the values to your other drives. Start-up times, head parks and so fourth may vary slightly so theres nothing to be worried about a little deviation there, but pay attention to failed reads, reallocated sectors, and RUEs. Granted, all of this advice should be taken with a grain of salt since SMART values are not the silver bullet to predict drive failure, but this testing should be a good indicator on whether or not a drive is ready for production use. Above all else, remember that backups are your friend.

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.

I am not a computer wizard. I installed this drive with 5 other drives in my large tower. I formatted the drive. It worked perfectly. I did not measure speed or any other parameters. I just know that it works to store my movies, music, and photographs. I only gave it 4 stars because I simply dont know its level of performance, meaning speed. As far as I am concerned it works as fast as I need it to work. This drive replaced a WD green 2 TB drive that had failed. I only got 3 years out of that 2 TB drive. I expect more. However, from reading reviews it is obvious that all the brands of hard drives have some sort of failure rate. I went for the red version because it is supposed to be built a little better. I hope so. BTW when that 2 TB WD storage drive failed, I got the BSD that told me that my system drive had failed and I needed to reinstall my operating system. I did not believe that blue screen that appeared under Windows 7. I began disconnecting storage drives until I found one that when disconnected allowed my computer to boot up perfectly. I then plugged this drive in hot and looked to see if I need anything left on it. Most of my folders were missing and those that were still there I did not need. So I just broke off the connectors and threw it in the garbage.

WD40EFRX HDDs run very cool because they spin at 5400 RPM and have only 3 platters inside. They are CMR/conventional magnetic recording HDDs and NOT SMR/shingled magnetic recording HDDs. Most folks should avoid SMR HDDs like the plague because of the odd read before write cycle that SMR drives employ. If you need a 4 TB HDD the WD40EFRX is the perfect HDD as far as Im concerned because it is reliable and runs cool. Now, I dont need a 72000 RPM drive because I boot from an SSD. My 4 TB HDDs are strictly for long term storage. Heres some technical info about WD40EFRX HDDS from the HDD Platter Database: - ?early? WD40EFRX HDDs that have model #s like WD40EFRX-**WT0N* have 4 platters - modern WD40EFRX HDDs that have model #s like WD40EFRX-**N32N* have 3 platters When a drive spins fewer platters it generates less heat, thus less heat in your case.