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

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

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

I purchased 2 of these drives as a replacement for two standard WD Red drives for my new Synology ds220+ NAS. The NAS could not be found on the wired network. Did some research and they do not always play well with Synology. Replaced with the plus drives and setup was quick and easy. They are silent when not being written to and with small transfers of data (few Mb) They emit a sound when transferring large amounts of data >2-3 Gbs. It was easy to install in Synology but that is a Synology review. Currently have almost 50% of the drive used with parity drive so if one fails, I can just swap it out and rebuild the drive without loss of data.

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.

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.

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.

Product met the sellers description

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!

I ordered two of the 4 TB WD Red drives to replace 2 2TB WD Green drives in a Synology DS-211J. They arrived with a born-on date of September 2014 and NASWARE 3.0 markings. They were made in Thailand. Drives arrived in decent (not great) packaging--Amazon had the sense to put the two smaller cardboard boxes holding the drives (with plastic wings/collars holding the drives in place) in a larger box with air pillows top and bottom and around the inside edges of the larger box. First drive went into the Synology and a full extended S.M.A.R.T. test was run. This took roughly 8 hours. It passed. A disk group/volume repaid/rebuild was initiated. The volume took around 6 hours to rebuild one side of a RAID 1 mirror onto this drive. The drive was at least as quiet, if not moreso, than the WD Green it replaced, its transfer rate was slightly faster, and it held temps roughly 2 degrees F cooler than the Green did under load (eg, the RAID rebuild). The second green was removed, and the second Red put in the array. A full smart test was initiated. Roughly 3 hours in, the 2nd Red drive started to make sick-sounding clicks and snaps and the drive would spin down, and then start up again. This continued for 10 minutes and the S.M.A.R.T. test failed. A second S.M.A.R.T. extended test was initiated. The drive clicked/snapped/spun down/spun up and kicked out of the test about 15 minutes later. Red came out for return/replacement to Amazon, Green went back in for the 2nd disk in the array and rebuilt in roughly 7 hours. Now, given a choice, I prefer infant mortality in drives because it allows for a return to the retailer and not an RMA process with the manufacturer. However, its slightly disconcerting that one has to bother to run a full test of a drive prior to putting it to use. Moreover, Im really glad it went before I rebuilt the 2nd half of the mirror on it and expanded the logical volume--I would not be able to fall back to one of the 2TB drives and be up somewhat of a creek if a replacement did not beat another failure to my door. Its worth noting that both Red drives arrived with their LCC timer set to 138 seconds. While this is better than the WD Greens used to be, WD supposedly fixed these to not unload the heads constantly. Fortunately, the Synology units running DSM 4.3 (or thereabouts) and later have the necessary WDIDLE utility built in to adjust the LCC timer to 0, which essentially disables head parking. This does take a reboot to accomplish. Amazon should be given kudos for the ease of initiating a return and printing out the prepackaged UPS label to return the defective drive--took 90 seconds. Amazon should be ashamed of the fact that they were prepared to send the replacement via slow shipping even though Im Prime and the originally purchased drives were overnighted. This was also fixable--I went in to the order to adjust shipping speed and set it to two-days, but its the principle of the thing--it shouldve been like that from the creation of the replacement/return order. Pros: Quiet. Low energy utilization. Cool. Slightly faster than a comparable WD Green in a low power (electricity and CPU) NAS. Cons: 1 of 2 DOA. LCC timers not properly set/disabled from the factory. Amazon trying to be thrifty with the replacement shipping. Thoughts: given a DOA and the lack of significant speed differences and the LCC timers being just as screwed up from the factory as a Green, Im wondering if there is anything beyond the extra warranty to merit moving from WD Green to WD Red. TLER. Maybe. Im going with three stars. DOAs happen and Amazons packaging, while not the best, is still not as poor as say, Newegg. I will revisit the review at some point once I have the replacements and the drives have been in service for a fashion.

This is my third 3 TB Red, they all work great. I have them in a tower PC running Windows 7 and am using Drive Pool (by Stablebit) to mirror my data (critical data is backed up in the cloud). This computer is my personal PC and I also use it to serve video (using Plex) to remote locations within my house via WiFi. These drives plug in and just start running, no drama, no trouble. The following is a little off subject but is the reason I needed this drive so I apologize in advance for the ramble. I had a drive go bad last fall and Drive Pool notified me that my drive was starting to fail and automatically moved the files from the failing drive to a free area of the pool. Turns out that DrivePool sensed that the drive was starting to fail about a month before total failure and moved all files before the drive quit. I operated with diminished storage capacity until I could save enough to purchase this drive. When I finally purchased this drive I removed the failed drive replaced it with the new one and marked the new drive as part of the pool. Drive Pool then automatically redistributed the data within the now larger pool and I didnt lose any data. In fact my loss was limited to the cost of a new drive and the hour or so it took to swap the drives. Again I apologize for the ramble but I know some of you are looking for solutions for your storage needs and I can personally recommend multiple WD Reds mounted in your existing PC and controlled with DrivePool for a great low cost choice.