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

Im an HTPC enthusiast, and Im using this 10TB red drive in my Windows HTPC. Im running a 60GB SSD that holds my Windows 10 Pro OS, and then I have several other much larger internal drives that I store my audio/video files on. I would not recommend installing your operating system on a hard drive this large. I can only imagine the problems youd run into. I have been running these red drives as extra storage for awhile now, and they work extremely well for the intended purpose. Ive been replacing my smaller green drives as they have aged, and its sad that WD doesnt make the green drives in these larger sizes. Ive only found the blue drives in sizes up to 6TB, so these larger red drives really fit the bill. They are the only 5200rpm WD drives I can find this large. If I run out of space in the main hard drive bay, I always install them in a 5.25 inch bay adapter, with at least a 80cm cooling fan. The main drive bay has a bigger fan of its own. Make sure you have a fan blowing on these large drives. Without proper cooling they can reach temps of 50C+ really quick, and that can mean a loss of your precious files. Ive been collecting stuff for 25+ years and I cant risk a loss. So, I always do a full format on my new drives from the start. Its a great way to test a new drive before you start moving those files over to the new drive. A full format on a 10TB hard drive will take around 12.5 hours, so just let it run overnight. Your fully formatted size will be 9314GB under the Windows OS. If you dont understand that then search the internet, its everywhere as to why. This drive was sold as a Plus drive, but I didnt see it printed anywhere on the drive as you can see. It doesnt matter to me though, because I will not being using it in a NAS system. I wasnt real happy about the manufactured date because it was almost a year ago. Wouldve preferred a drive with a more recent date. Other than those 2 things, I havent run into any issues with these red drives. They function really well for extra storage in my HTPC, and Im going to buy more as the size increase. I sure do wish WD would make green or blue drives in these sizes, not sure why they dont.

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.

I used this disk to replace a graphics and downloads drive on my home server. The old drive was a 1TB WD green from a few years ago. Since I figured I would give this drive a thorough run-through, I copied all the data using a USB 2 external adapter sitting on the floor on top of the bag the drive came in. It copied a few hundred thousand files of varying sizes in a couple of hours, mostly writing at about 31/MBs. I was surprised when it was running at how quiet the drive was and that it remained quite cool. After I pulled the old drive out of the server I compared the two, and this was actually lighter than the old 1TB green, I was surprised. In windows I ran a few crystal disk mark tests: The WD Red averaged 150 MB/s read and 130 MB/s write (Seq. 5 tests). The WD Green averaged 96 MB/s read and 88 MB/s write (Seq. 5 tests). Two Seagate 4TB drives (5900 RPM) in a Raid 1 averaged 143 MB/s read and 123 MB/s write (Seq. 5 tests). As the tests show, it outperformed the other drives, but the Seagates were definitely close and cost about 3/4 the price of the Red. I cant really speak for reliability since it has only been running a month, so my fingers are crossed for sure about that. My main problem with the huge storage drives available now is that it is pretty much mandatory to buy 2 in order to backup properly. You used to be able to get by backing up to tapes or discs, but its just not feasible with something like a 4TB drive. Heres hoping that this drive has Western Digital reliability and treats me as well as the old Green drive did.

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.

I purchased two of the 3TB drives and one of the 2TB drives. When I went into WDIDLE3 the setting for all three drives were set to 300 seconds (5 minutes). Since I was in there I simply disabled it. These drives are working flawlessly thus far as I have the two 3TB drives in a media center running Media Browser 3, PlayOn, and a few other apps. The 2TB drive is hooked up to a Dish Network Hopper as a secondary storage. I have not experienced any issues so far with these drive. I will update as time goes on with more info. *Update 3/27/15: Some drive information obtained from HD Guardian: Drive 01 Serial Number: WD-WCC4N7E***** Firmware: 82.00A82 User Capacity: 3,000,592,982,016 bytes Product Name Status Exp Date (MM/DD/YYYY) 3 TB WD Red Hard Drive In Limited Warranty 1/6/2018 Overall Health: Temperature: 34*C High: 36*C Low: 34*C Last Test: Completed without error. No bad sector detected. No ATA error detected. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 185 182 021 Pre-fail Always - 5733 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 42 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 673 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 5 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 1 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 40 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 116 110 000 Old_age Always - 34 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 Working Time: 673 hours (28 days, 1 hours) Last Update Fri Mar 27 01:53:28 2015 CDT Drive 02 Serial Number: WD-WMC4N0F***** Firmware: 82.00A82 User Capacity: 3,000,592,982,016 bytes Product Name Status Exp Date (MM/DD/YYYY) 3 TB WD Red Hard Drive In Limited Warranty 12/11/2017 Overall Health: Temperature: 37*C High: 41*C Low: 35*C Last Test: N/A No bad sector detected. No ATA error detected. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 181 179 021 Pre-fail Always - 5950 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 50 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 672 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 4 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 1 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 48 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 113 109 000 Old_age Always - 37 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 Working Time: 672 hours (28 days) Last Update Fri Mar 27 01:53:28 2015 CDT ------------------------------------------- Update 5/14/2015 Some drive information obtained from HD Guardian: Drive 01 Serial Number: WD-WCC4N7E***** Firmware: 82.00A82 User Capacity: 3,000,592,982,016 bytes Product Name Status Exp Date (MM/DD/YYYY) 3 TB WD Red Hard Drive In Limited Warranty 1/6/2018 Overall Health: Temperature: 37*C High: 37*C Low: 34*C Last Test: Completed without error. No bad sector detected. No ATA error detected. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 186 182 021 Pre-fail Always - 5700 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 193 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 98 98 000 Old_age Always - 1844 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 5 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 1 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 190 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 113 108 000 Old_age Always - 37 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 Working Time: 1844 hours (2 months 16 days, 20 hours) Last Update Fri May 14 22:31:35 2015 CDT Drive 02 Serial Number: WD-WMC4N0F***** Firmware: 82.00A82 User Capacity: 3,000,592,982,016 bytes Product Name Status Exp Date (MM/DD/YYYY) 3 TB WD Red Hard Drive In Limited Warranty 12/11/2017 Overall Health: Temperature: 37*C High: 41*C Low: 35*C Last Test: N/A No bad sector detected. No ATA error detected. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 181 179 021 Pre-fail Always - 5908 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 242 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 98 98 000 Old_age Always - 1836 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 5 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 1 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 240 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 110 106 000 Old_age Always - 40 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 Working Time: 1836 hours (2 months, 16 days, 12 hours) Last Update Fri May 14 22:31:35 2015 CDT

After about six months of searching for the perfect drive, I finally settled on two of these Western Digital Red 2TB WD20EFRX hard drives. I was ready to purchase HGST enterprise drives, the former Hitachi, but WD came out with these drives just in-time. I wanted to get the 3TB WD30EFRX version for my

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!

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

Ive been quite happy with these drives, so far, in a