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

I bought these to run in a RAID Array after my WD Blue RAID array kept failing. The RED drives, with their TLER support, prevent arrays from breaking due to read/write delays unlike the blue drive,s which was the issue I was having. Also, with their 3D Active Balance Plus you can run them in multi drive environments (or even in a PC with other fans running) without fear of increased wear/tear or damage. At first I had thought all the technology was just gimmick, but when my Blue array kept failing, I upgraded to these and havent had a single issue since. They are not the fastest drives available, but then again most people with NAS dont have enclosures fast enough to take advantage of the increased speed regardless... I use my HP Z600 as my NAS, which allows me to use the data/drives without a network bottleneck locally, and allows my other computers to access it through the LAN. It works well for what Im using it for. Overall, I can say Id buy them again. They have been running 24/7 for 7 months now without any issues, so so far, so good. Ill update this review if anything changes.

The 8TB drives I have received arrived on time and work fine. They also appear to be CMR technology. If you are considering any other size (less than 8TB in the WD RED product line) for used in a NAS or any RAID configuration, I suggest you google SMR vs CMR. I will not try to explain SMR, other than saying, it is designed to perform well under light load. Many users are complaining about performance of SMR drives in NAS devices during array rebuilds (whenever you extend/expand/replace drives in an array). I have not had a problem with the 8TB drive I purchased, but I did have another SMR drive that failed during a rebuild. Infact the SMR drive that appeared to fail, tested fine when it was removed from the array but under the heavy load of a rebuild the drive was performing so poorly that the system thought it had failed. At the time I am writing this, the WD RED 2 - 6 TB drives appear to be SMR based. The WD RED 8TB and all the WD RED Pro appear to be CMR.

I replace my NAS drives every couple of years or so as it gets full, doubling the capacity each time. Prior to these 8TB drives I had a pair of 4TB WD reds, and before that a pair of 2TB WD greens and before that a pair of 1TB WD greens. These drives perform very well - on a par with the 4s I removed. But they make lots of strange noises, like intermittent soft buzzing, and occasional faint humming. They are noticeably noisier than the 4TB reds I replaced. But Ive been running them for almost 2 months without a hiccup. I have yet to lose a WD drive in this NAS over 7 years of 24x7 operation so I will stick with WD until that changes.

I got five of these in October 2021, and they have been working fine with TrueNAS in RAIDZ2 configuration.

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.

Im not sure I understand the marketing concept of a Red Drive, but I live in a Red State so... Anyway these drives are low power, cool, and quiet. Compared to the WD Black drives, they are a dream come true. I had been using black drives on my desktop and in a USB holder and they made so much noise and vibration I simply dont understand how they can function. I gave the USB mounted drive to my son to put into his computer and went Red. The red drives are silent, have no vibration, and the performance hit is minimal. From what I can tell, they spin down to low RPM when not in use, but they do not stop. This allows them to spin up much faster than drives that are stopped. Even at full use they are very low energy devices. By comparison a Black WD drive will be HOT to the touch. These stay at room temperature without a fan! I think the Red product line is the future of hard drives. I fully expect these drives will dramatically outlast their warranty, and I would wager that the application of higher end mechanical construction like that used in the higher performance drives could result in the industries first 10 year warranty. My view is that the red product line is serious SSD competition, and with the application of some systems technology, hard drives will never be replaced by SSDs, until we can store data in a true crystalline structure that does not need rocket science to fix the errors created by use. Ive been in the computer industry consuming hard drives since the 5 MByte hard drives were high tech (thats not a typo, 5 Megabytes), and these drives are the best. Eventually I hope to replace everything here with them primarily because of the power savings and performance. Power consumption effects everything from your UPC performance to your electric bill to your noise budget from high capacity fans. Marketing could do a much better job on these red drives - for instance I bet they pay for themselves over other drives in power savings in time; I doubt they require fans in many home applications especially if the fans are modulated by the drives temperature sensors; and the lack of vibration and noise is a huge plus. Although I maintain a triple level backup strategy (called experience), I have not encountered any issues in spite of continuous use 24/7 for Windows (which is a frightening OS for disk usage). /Len

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.

Cant go wrong with these drives if you have a home/small business NAS (1-8 drives). Purchased two 2-TB RED drives as used - very good from Amazon Warehouse Deals. These drives are specifically designed to function in NAS devices. Drives are to be installed in a QNAP TS-231 2-drive NAS - FYI please check the compatibility of your NAS device BEFORE you purchase drives for it. Most manufacturers have a list on their websites highly recommended to verif;y unless you buy a NAS with drives already installed. would leave five stars but not done with testing, even though I expect them to be great. Will revise once they are spinning for a while longer. WD sells RED drives in the following configurations: Model # Interface Form Factor Capacity Cache WD60EFRX SATA 6 Gb/s 3.5 Inch IntelliPower 6 TB 64 MB WD50EFRX SATA 6 Gb/s 3.5 Inch IntelliPower 5 TB 64 MB *WD40EFRX SATA 6 Gb/s 3.5 Inch IntelliPower 4 TB 64 MB *WD30EFRX SATA 6 Gb/s 3.5 Inch IntelliPower 3 TB 64 MB *WD20EFRX SATA 6 Gb/s 3.5 Inch IntelliPower 2 TB 64 MB *WD10EFRX SATA 6 Gb/s 3.5 Inch IntelliPower 1 TB 64 MB *WD10JFCX SATA 6 Gb/s 2.5 Inch IntelliPower 1 TB 16 MB *WD7500BFCX SATA 6 Gb/s 2.5 Inch IntelliPower 750 GB 16 MB •* Retailers may have existing product inventory of WD Red with NASware 2.0 for the specific capacities ranging from 1 TB – 4 TB. Please check with your retailer prior to purchasing for current inventory and product availability of WD Red with NASware 3.0 10-15- Update: Drives installed and running for about a week now. One drive was still in sealed bag and was new - the second one was run about 140 hours. All other S.M.A.R.T. data was perfect. Im not an advocate of used drives, but in this case, it seems to have worked out. Final note: WD makes a PRO version of this drive with a 5-year warranty, compared to three for this model.

May 2014 - I forgot to update this, so Im doing it almost a year later. Down graded to one star. TLDR - Amazon was great, however, 4 drives (two sets of two) failed in 24 hours. Extensive conversations with WD second level support resulting in them saying return the drives, so I bought 3TB green drives again for the external enclosures, and 3TB Toshiba/Hitachi drives for the NAS. Very unimpressed with WD RED drives - all marketing on what are really just average drives. This is to justify continued higher costs after the flood farce perpetrated on the public. Yes, the flood happened, however, the raping of the customers has continued (easily researched what theyve done, and prices dont lie). Lets hope SSDs come down in price soon.... ****** Original review ****** Im leaving a generous, but temporary, 2-star review. My two drives failed within 24 hours and Im awaiting replacement drives so Ill update this review after Ive tested them. First, I want to state that Amazons shipping was flawless and I dont think it was a problem for these drives. I currently own at least 25 WD drives (as well as many by other vendors) and ordered 2x 3TB Red drives for use first in external enclosures, and later to be put in a Synology NAS. They never made it past the enclosure stage, and were dead in a day. All work, no play, for me at least. 1) Drives were placed in USB 3.0 external enclosures, initialized as GPT under Win7 (x64), and a NTFS Quick format was performed. I then ran a SMART Quick Test using WDs Data Lifeguard (DLG), which passed fine. Note: DLG quick test only checks the first and last million sectors, leaving most of the drive unchecked. The drives were each loaded with approx 1.5TB of data, and then shutdown properly using Safely remove hardware before disconnecting. Note: the 1-year-old enclosures support 3TB drives - verified with the mfg again this morning - and were previously housing WD and Hitachi 2TB drives without issue. 2) Attempted to start the drives the next day, but they werent identified by Explorer, and when finally found in Disk Management (under Admin -> Computer Management) they were once again showed as Not initialized. They were in effect, dead to me. 3) I attempted to mount the drives on another, almost new, high-end computer running Win8 Pro. The drives were not seen by Explorer, but could be found under Disk Management, however, they showed with 2TB labeled MBR protected and 7xxGB unallocated. No data could be read. 4) Contacted WD support. After discussing all events and options, their recommendation was sendem back to us or Amazon, theyre dead. 5) I accepted that something had gone wrong, but again using DLG, I tried a low level process called Write Zeros. The first drive simply failed with bad sectors after running for 5 hours. I tried to continue the process by clicking the pop-up error window 50-100x times before finally giving up. I couldnt format it, couldnt write zeros, nothing worked. After several more attempts, I finally got it to finish a windows format (ran for the last 12 hours), but I dont trust it. The second drive did allow me to Write Zeros, but I dont trust it either. Theyre both going back. Write Zeros may temporarily fix drives, but may also just mask the underlying problem(s). (And yes, I understand erasing vs. formatting, the data implications, etc.). WD has a problem, and because of that so do we. I recommend everyone format and test these drives before use. I know drives fail; Ive had many drive failures in the last couple of years (3 Seagate, 5 Samsung F4s, etc.) but all before they were mounted in a NAS. Read the reviews, understand that its a lottery, and though I had hoped for more, I didnt win the first time. You may get lucky.... or.... you may not. Ill update this review after receiving my new drives, and have tested them in brand new enclosures.

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!