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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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!

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

almost 3 years later(((2y, 5m, 15d, 11h))) its still doing ok using in a unraid box smart status 1 Raw read error rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always Never 0 3 Spin up time 0x0027 180 174 021 Pre-fail Always Never 4000 4 Start stop count 0x0032 097 097 000 Old age Always Never 3105 5 Reallocated sector count 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always Never 0 7 Seek error rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 0 9 Power on hours 0x0032 071 071 000 Old age Always Never 21587 (2y, 5m, 15d, 11h) 10 Spin retry count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old age Always Never 0 11 Calibration retry count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old age Always Never 0 12 Power cycle count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old age Always Never 26 192 Power-off retract count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 22 193 Load cycle count 0x0032 199 199 000 Old age Always Never 3082 194 Temperature celsius 0x0022 118 109 000 Old age Always Never 29 196 Reallocated event count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 0 197 Current pending sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 0 198 Offline uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old age Offline Never 0 199 UDMA CRC error count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 0 200 Multi zone error rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old age Offline Never 0

Its a very good hard drive for NAS, just as described. so far it has worked great. I have only noticed that over time the noise level has increased when uploading to the NAS.

Lets get this out of the way first, Im kind of a WD fanboy but with good reason I think. Ive been using them for as long as I can remember, and maybe its just my personal luck but I think theyve been better to me than any other brand. The only ones I dont really like are the Green drives, and Im willing to accept that they are perfectly fine as external drives that arent being constantly accessed. The Green is in mega power saving mode and loves to spin down, which means youre looking at longer access times and more wear and tear if you leave it plugged in and access it frequently. I wanted to punch my monitor every time I waited the magical 5 minutes (or whatever it is) before clicking on what I needed, just to wait several seconds on the drive to spin back up. I dont currently use NAS or RAID but considering my options this seemed like my best bet for frequently accessed mass storage, and I was at one point considering RAID (still am kind of). Black is better, faster, and as such costs more, but I couldnt justify it since I have an SSD for things that need to be fast. I bought this 4TB Red to put in my computer and replace a 3TB Green external drive I was using. Ive had it since August of 2014 which isnt that long at this point but its given me zero reason to complain, same as the 3TB Red I bought in October to replace a 1TB Blue. The only thing Ive noticed that was cause for concern at first is these things seem to be a little louder than your standard WD Blue or Green drive on read and write operations, and I thought I may have gotten one with a defect. Im not sure why that is, but I was much less concerned about it when I got the second drive and it sounded about the same. They seem to have quietened down some with use, and again they have given me no issues whatsoever. Ill definitely be buying more of these when the time comes. UPDATE 6/30/2015 Just wanted to say I am still running a 4tb and a 3tb WD Red in my computer and theyve been absolutely trouble free. One of them seems to make a short quiet buzzing noise every now and then that sounds out of place if youre used to diagnosing bad drives by sound like Ive had to do on many occasions, but every test Ive run comes up clean and Ive had no issues whatsoever out of either drive. Chkdsk, SMART, and benchmarks are clean and consistent and I use these daily as secondary drives for all my storage and most of my games. I really cant recommend these highly enough. That being said, I always feel the need to tell people KEEP BACKUPS. Any drive can fail and its always painful when it happens if you dont have regular backups. Its not cheap to match storage space for backups but trust me... That one day you need it -- and you will one day or one year unless you replace your drives regularly -- its money well spent.