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

Both drives came well packet and undamaged. Did thorough block check and both came back as good. Installed them in NAS with two other matching drives I got a few weeks back. Total four WD Red 3TB NAS drives now. Made sure at latest firmware, also turned head parking off. Used zfs raidz2 with lz4 compression. I now have 5.2TB of space that can stand an any two drive failure. Getting uncompressed transfer speeds over 170MBs. They are quite and cool. Very happy so far. 12-30-2015. Had a drive fail out of the four in my NAS. I used ZFS mirrored stripes, raind10, with four of these drives. Bad drive was spitting CRC errors to console. Tried different cabels and controller. Still error. Ordered another drive and problem is gone. Now. RMA from WD website. Decided to rebuild NAS from scratch, after backup of course. New version of ZFS . now my scrub speed is 248MB. 4/4/2016. Purchased two more of these and added another mirrored vdev to my stripe. 3TB more usable space and the speed of an extra spindle. I plan on getting two more in a few weeks for the total of 8 drives in 4 mirrored vdevs all in one stripe. It wont keep my 10Gb network busy but im getting 350MB in transfers across the wire now. hoping to get over 400MB when I ad the last 2 drives. Update 8/10/2016 - I know have 8 WD drives are on a Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 Add-on Card, 8-Channel SAS/SATA Adapter with 600MB/s per Channel in a PCIE x16 running at x8 on a Supermicro ATX DDR4 LGA 1151 C7Z170-OCE-O Motherboard with 64GB DDR4 RAM. I am running CentOS 7 kernel 4.7 with Btrfs 4.7 and btrfs-prods 4.7. I have the 8 drives in a RAID10 btrfs pool. I also have my PC and ESXi server attached to this NAS via Intel CNA 10Gb dual port cards using SFP+ DACs. I am getting non cached reads/writes at over 500MB via windows smd share. Smooth line at that i might add. My ESXi server has a NFS mount to the pool were I store most of my guest images. 8 seconds for a non cache Windows Server 2012 image to boot to login screen. Oh ya, cached reads/writes are 1.2GBs (1,200MB) over my network, yikes scoob! Update 01/25/2017 - I know have 11 of these drives. 8 of them are in my NAS, 2 in PC running RAID1, and another spare in the box in-case i have drive go bad. They are not fastest drives but work well for me.

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.

Review for: WD Red 2 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD20EFRX I have 4 of these in my ReadyNAS NV+. They replaced four 1.5TB drives that had filled up and also periodically require a boot scan that would take hours to complete. These WD Drives have yet to need a boot scan. Transfer speeds with the new drives across my network did drop by about 20% from the old 7200 RPM drives. There a many complaints about new hard drives being DOA. Mechanical abuse is always a concern but drives can survive hard knocks surprisingly well when theyre not running. A more likely reason for DOA is user failure to treat these static sensitive devices with at least minimal electro-static discharge (ESD) avoidance procedures. Touching an earth ground before opening that silvery bag can make the difference between a functioning drive and a door stop. Avoid touching the drives circuit board and connector contacts. During winter heating season, the human body can easily acquire a 10,000 volt or greater charge just walking around the room. Do you sometimes get shocked touching a doorknob? Ideally, wear a simple grounding wrist strap connected to a known good earth ground before handling any ESD sensitive electronic component. One can be purchased here for less than $2: http://www.amazon.com/Static-Wrist-Strap-Discharge-Grounding/dp/B00530GDHG/ref=sr_1_4?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1395771639&sr=1-4&keywords=grounding+strap 6/4/2017 Update: One the the 4 drives failed after 3 years and was replaced with the same model. The 3 original drives and the replacement continue to operate nominally in the ReadyNAS NV+. 3/7/2019 Update: all drives continue to run nominally.

I purchased this from Amazon Warehouse in Used-Acceptable condition. Running an initial S.M.A.R.T. test revealed 0 Bad Sectors, however, the drive did have a drive reconnection count of 13. While 13 for this metric is not good, I monitor it weekly, and no new drive reconnects have occurred. As the drive had a relatively low 400 hrs when I received it, I was ok keeping the drive, given the 30% discount from full price. I recommend buying WD Red drives from Amazon Warehouse when the discounts are warrant it. I think these are a great value. Make sure to research the spin RPMs and whether the drive is CMR or SMR. Many of the WD Red drives may be advertised as 5400 RPM Class, but they actually run at 7200 RPM. Lastly, avoid any SMR drives altogether.

Update 1/24/14 - WD has posted a utility (WD Red SMART load/Unload utility)on the support download page for this drive that supposedly installs a firmware update to help with this problem. I have not tried it but it appears to be specifically designed for these drives and their high head parking issue. Update 1/11/14 - Just received and tested my 2nd drive from Amazon. It also was received with the Idle3 timer set to 8 seconds. I used the Wdidle3 program from WD to reset this timer to 300 seconds and then tested the drive using the WD Diagnostics Utility. Drive tested fine. For reference, both of these drives that came with the Idle3 timer set for 8 seconds were WD part number: WD30EFRX-68EUZN0. I have seen some indication on other web sites that this issue may be unique to drives with the -68EUZN0 part number. ========= My issue is a brand new WD30EFRX from Amazon that out of the box has the Idle3 timer set to 8 seconds. When installed in my ReadyNAS Ultra 4 it climbed to 1200 LCCs in the 1st 24 hours. Since the unit is only rated for 600,000 LCCs in its lifetime at this rate it would reach its specified rating in a little over a year. Based on the responses from WD below, I am forced to modify these drives using the WDIDDLE3 tool prior to installation in my NAS to give them any chance of lasting for the full 3-year warranty period. I have had a couple of email exchanges with WD Technical Support on this, the latest being today. I asked them 3 questions and have posted their responses below. Questions to WD Technical Support and their replies below 1. Is there something wrong with this drive? At the current rate of head parking this drive will reach a count of somewhere in the 2-3 million cycles before the 3 year warranty period is reached. If WD really believes that the drives can survive this many parking cycles why do you only list 600,000 in your specification? Since this will be 4-5 times the specified value it does appear something is wrong with the drive. (WD Response) Some utilities, operating systems, and applications, such as some implementations of Linux, for example, are not optimized for low power storage devices and can cause our drives to wake up at a higher rate than normal. This effectively negates the power-saving advantages of low-power drives, such as Western Digitals WD Red, and artificially increases the number of load-unload cycles. They also stated in another email that To date, we have had no reported hard drive failures due to cycle and load times with any of our drives. 2. Should the Idle3 timer have been set to 8 seconds when I received it? I have seen several other postings and test data/reviews on the internet where people state when they received their WD30EFRX the Idle3 timer was disabled? (WD Response) - They did not answer this question 3. Is there something I can do to reduce the LCC concern and increase the life of this drive if I am still concerned about it? I have seen several posts where people claim that using the WDIDLE3 tool works OK, but it is not listed as a drive for this tool on the WD web site. Is this tool OK to use or is there something else that can be done to change this operation? (WD Response) - The WDIddle3 utility has not been designed for this particular product. However, weve seen cases where customers have used the tool with this internal drive and managed to set Idle3 to max time which effectively turns off load/unload power saving feature. Please also find the link for the WDiddle3 utility which should allow you to set the WDiddle 3 for your needs. [...] Note that this is version 1_05. I have seen references to a version 2.0...., but have never been able to find a copy of it. The link they sent me is for version 1_05 and it worked fine for me. I have used the WDIDDLE3 (version 1_05) tool to set the Idle3 timer on my WD30EFRX to 300 seconds and so far I have only had a couple of LCC increases in a few days. Although this is a pain to deal with, I still believe this is a good drive for the NAS application and have another drive on order. It will be interesting to see if it also has the Idle3 timer set to 8 seconds when I receive it. If it does I will also change it to 300 seconds.

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.

So far VERY GOOD. I actually just purchased this to use as a backup drive and I had a very specific mission that this helped me complete. From I dont know, 1999-Now Ive used close to 15 drives, going back to 16gb (or so) HDDs which were big back in the 90s up to 1tb drives of today, but I had a huge problem of missing files. Photos in particular. I was using drive bays to attach the old drives to the PC and try and search them all at once but Windows search really sucks. (Yes I should have booted into Ubuntu - shame on me), but I said, you know what, enough is enough, I know WD has these 6tb drives, let me literally copy the contents of ALL of the drives Ive ever owned onto it, and do one main search. Thanks to this drive, and some other creative methods *dusts self off* I did one big search of everything on this drive and found lots of old treasures, including the fountain of youth, just kidding. In recent weeks I realized, well, not that it would have helped with Windows not recognizing/initializing certain drives, but a freeware app like UltraSearch does things that windows explorer search refuses to, I guess Windows Explorer has dark moods, was tired of me playing Iggy Azalea on it, and went on strike when I tried to search for things; UltraSearch casts no aspersions with respect to my musical interests, so it just does searches for me regardless... Lo and behold, while I couldnt copy ALL the drives I own onto it, nor did I need to with respect to trying to find files from 10+ years ago, I was able to (with the help of Ubuntu), recover data off of drives that Windows 7 no longer read, but Ubuntu did, thanks Microsoft, and recover otherwise lost data onto this 6TB RED, and other newer drives from the 2000s. Its still got about 1.5tb free so Ill be using this as a third backup drive, keeping it disconnected from the PC not even in a NAS device, so I figure it will last ALOT longer. Perhaps putting it into a safe deposit box will ensure its survival in case of another Hurricane Sandy, or an Iggy Azalea attack of some sort.

I bought two of the 12TB drives to extend my Windows Storage pool. I just plugged them in and went to Disk Management and Initialized them. Then I added the drives to the storage pool and did some reconfiguring. The storage pool is now 29.1 TB and setup for two way mirroring. These drives have been on for 124 hours now and running well with a 33 degree C temperature. The server sits next to me and runs fairly quiet. These drives arent any louder than the 4TB drives they replaced. In fact those 4TB drives are up to 19000 power on hours and about 5 years service. They never showed signs of trouble but they storage pool was getting too small for my collection of movies, videos, music, and documents. So currently Im using the old drives for a non redundant offsite backup. I loaded the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on my server and I am using rsync to copy changes between my mirrored pool and the offsite drives. Anyway - I really like the WD red drives. Just be sure that if you get sizes less than 6TB for your NAS or storage space you want the Plus or the Pro series to make sure you get Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) versus the shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology. SMR was invented to pack more bits into a drive but it doesnt play well with NAS systems. Drives of 8TB to 14TB are all CMR so no worries on the higher capacity drives.

Always looking for extra space? Yeah, me too. I had purchased an HP-MicroNAS server online, 8GB RAM but no HDs. So I added a pair of these 4TB RED disks. When they arrived, it was probably the fastest setup Id ever done. I utilized FreeNAS 11.2 (installed from a Thumb-drive) and a 750GB disk I had sitting around. The 750g was the system drive, and FreeNAS chose these two 4TB as a simple RAID1 Volume. The entire setup took about 10 minutes. Power - the whole unit uses less than 15-20w when idle, and scales up when needed. After replicating my data to this system, the drives were still inaudible, and the fan on the HP is whisper quiet too. Performance? Not the worlds fastest (at work I deal with close to 1GByte per second) but for daily archiving and storage, these are doing nicely on my 1gb LAN. Using LZ4 compression, they are doing nicely holding all of my photos and music. Additionally, my daughter is an artist and has LOTS of movie-editing files in her directory. Well see how it goes in 6mos, 1 year, 3 years. but by that time, Ill probably be using 20TB M.2 SSDs because they are $49. ;-) Bottom line, great performance and reliability for a good price.

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