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 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.

Ordered 4 of these to make a RAID10 array to hold my iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie libraries. I had those libraries on a single Lacie external HDD via Thunderbolt and that failed right after the 3 year warranty expired. That wasnt catastrophic because I have multiple backups, but this gave me the excuse to use a RAID10 setup. I wanted the RAID10 for 2 reasons: 1. Ease of failure recovery 2. increased speed. Looked at a lot of drives and the WD Reds seemed to fit the bill. I also ordered an OWC Thunderbay 4 RAID Thunderbolt 2 enclosure to put them in. Nice combo. The speed of these drives seems right in line with what I expected. Heres what I measured with Blackmagic on my 2011 iMac through a TB cable: Single drive: 146 Mbps RAID0 x 4 drives: 560 Mbps (that was cool) RAID1 x 2 drives: 141 Mbps RAID10 x 4 drives: 286 Mbps That all seems to line up with expectations. There are probably faster single drives out there that push closer to 165+ Mbps, but this works for what I need. If I really want more speed Ill just put 4 SDDs in there and let er rip @ 1 Gbps. What made me giggle is that the internal drive on my iMac runs at 96 Mbps, so my external RAID10 is faster than the internal drive. I guess they made slower drives way back in 2011. Hope they hold up well but if they dont I wont have any down time.

WD40EFRX HDDs run very cool because they spin at 5400 RPM and have only 3 platters inside. They are CMR/conventional magnetic recording HDDs and NOT SMR/shingled magnetic recording HDDs. Most folks should avoid SMR HDDs like the plague because of the odd read before write cycle that SMR drives employ. If you need a 4 TB HDD the WD40EFRX is the perfect HDD as far as Im concerned because it is reliable and runs cool. Now, I dont need a 72000 RPM drive because I boot from an SSD. My 4 TB HDDs are strictly for long term storage. Heres some technical info about WD40EFRX HDDS from the HDD Platter Database: - ?early? WD40EFRX HDDs that have model #s like WD40EFRX-**WT0N* have 4 platters - modern WD40EFRX HDDs that have model #s like WD40EFRX-**N32N* have 3 platters When a drive spins fewer platters it generates less heat, thus less heat in your case.

Drives dont fail a lot but some due. I was the lucky one to get a drive with an IO device error. I had to wait 1 month for my replacement drive (I selected standard). To my astonishment, I received an used drive.........with IO device error (impossible to format, clean, initialize). This is when I found out that WD ALWAYS RETURNS REFURBISHED DRIVES FOR RMA. Not the ideal business model in my humble opinion, as they use the drives from other RMA returns. WD claims that the drives go through extensive testing, but so did the defective drive they send me after my RMA claim. Now I escalated the issue to WD management and insisted they send me a new drive (they offered a higher capacity refurbished model, no thx). WD mgt approved this and to my great surprise received a disk with marks on the front plate, again a used drive. The disk passed all test I could possibly run on it, but writing speeds were in KB/s range (yes I did check on different slots on my server and different computers for SATA connection issues). The likeliness that you will get an inferior product is high, logically as they use recovered RMA drives. This is such a bad business policy, trying to save a couple of $$ on dissatisfied customers. I still cant wrap my mind around it. I was not going to go through this again or gamble on a 4rth drive being perfect. Raised the issue to Amazon and they refunded the money. Customer Obsession works at Amazon for sure not WD. I honestly think the issue is that terrible service center in Calexico. They never kept my RMA statuses updated, I had to insist several times on updates, they test the drives poorly (which I think is a fair claim) and I assume poorly executed the instructions on sending a new drive and took what they had on stock for my case. Once you have to deal with them, you are in a BAD position! SHOULD YOU CLAIM A RMA TRY TO GET YOUR MONEY BACK AND NOT A REPLACEMENT DRIVE SO YOU CAN BUY A NEW DRIVE. IF THAT DOENST WORK INSIST ON A NEW DRIVE. IF THAT DOESNT WORK CONTACT AMAZON AND GET A REFUND. ------------------------ WD SUPPORT STATEMENT WD’s replacement Product under its limited warranty will be manufactured from new and serviceable USED parts. PS why 2 stars? I wanted to give a higher rating, as I also own a 30EFRX and a 60EFAX which run like a dream. The 30FRX is very reliable disk check backblaze. But 3x a faulty drive? One star would not be fair.

These work well in my QNAP TS-451 NAS setup. Have two 3TB drives in raid 1. Quiet and cool, no problems whatsoever yet. I did notice that even though I have recent firmware on the drives, the load cycle count was still going up: Even though my drives came set to 300 seconds, here were my stats for each drive after 3 months: ~6000 LCC over 1451 hours ~= a load cycle every 900 seconds These drives are supposed to be rated for 300,000 LCC, so 300,000/6000 * 1451 hours = 8 years 8 years aint too bad, (Id probably replace the drives in that time) but it really doesnt provide much buffer. I reasoned that I am still happily using a 1TB drive from 2009 (6 years ago) and expect to for another couple years. So in the end I decided to just disable it for now. Since I didnt have a external SATA enclosure compatible with drives of terabyte size, I had to find a wdidle binary compiled for my NAS. Once I did, disabling the load cycle feature was easy: ------------------------ Move the program to the NAS and make it executable: macbook_computer$ scp idle3ctl [email protected]:/root xxx@xxxxs password: idle3ctl 100% 14KB 14.2KB/s 00:00 [~] # chmod +x idle3ctl [~] # ./idle3ctl -V idle3ctl v0.9.1 ---------- Find your drives locations: [~] # fdisk -l /dev/sd? Disk /dev/sda: 3000.5 GB, 3000592982016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 364801 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 267350 2147483647+ ee EFI GPT Disk /dev/sdb: 3000.5 GB, 3000592982016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 364801 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1 267350 2147483647+ ee EFI GPT ... ------ Check the current values: [~] # ./idle3ctl -g105 /dev/sda [~] # ./idle3ctl -g105 /dev/sdb (both said 300 seconds) ------- disable both (can do just one to test first): [~] # ./idle3ctl -d /dev/sda [~] # ./idle3ctl -d /dev/sda -------- reboot (I rebooted from the web UI) and check again: [~] # ./idle3ctl -g105 /dev/sda Idle3 timer is disabled [~] # ./idle3ctl -g105 /dev/sdb Idle3 timer is disabled -------- In the end I wouldnt let the LCC feature sway you one way or the other. Its been fixed to an acceptable timer setting now, and in many cases is probably useful. I just disabled it to be safe so I can get hopefully 8+ years out of these 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

Got this drive for my soon-to-be media server build. First one I got was defective. It freaked me out because when connected to my computer through the Apricorn Drivewire adapter, it showed up in Disk Management, but once I pressed initialize and waited, it never showed up in My Computer. After a day of debugging without end, I finally decided to RMA it to Amazon for a replacement unit. This is where the story become great. Amazon didnt charge me a penny more to send the new drive, and it arrived 2 - 3 days after I submitted the RMA, almost a week ahead of schedule, while the original drive took the normal super saver shipping speed of 5 - 8 days. They sent the replacement immediately, without waiting for me to ship the old drive, which I did several days later. New drive works like a champ, its connected to the old laptop Im using as a dedicated media server for the time being, via a Thermaltake BlacX dock and has file operations going to it 24/7. Ive streamed 1080p videa from it thru my network, which I should really be praising my wireless router for, but this drives endurance is outstanding an it has not once gotten bogged down yet. So, the people that say that the quality control of Hard Drive factories went way down after all that flooding in Taiwan were absolutely correct, but Amazons customer service makes up for that. 0 stars for the DOA drive, 5 stars for the replacement = 3 stars + 1 star for Amazon taking care of this in such an awesome way. Im going to get 7 more of these over time, I just wait for the price to drop to the lowest its been and order another one. (My server build will house 8 3.5 drives, hotswap).

Purchased WD Red 4TB in 2016. I did not use it much for the first year or two. Early this year, I started using this drive a lot. I am using as an external drive in a USB 3.1 cradle for backups and short term storage of large (20GB to 100GB files). I appreciate the low vibration; other drives in the same cradle can cause resonate vibration of other things on my desk; this drive is almost silent and vibration free. I am getting all of the expected performance; no degradation from not having a direct SATA III connection. Operating temp is very good; it seldom gets above 40c, even after long periods of high activity. Other people have commented on warranty issues. While I have never had a problem with these drives, I did look up the warranty status on WDs website recently. They correctly reported that the warranty had just expired after my three years of ownership. In 2016, I paid about $150 for the 4TB model. I considered that a decent price. Earlier this year, I started looking for a new 4TB drive. At that time, this drive was about $115. I spent a week or two looking at refurb enterprise ;evel 4TB models. They go for about $80, and the quality and warranty are really hit or miss. Now, this drive in the 4TB size is down to $100. At that price, for exactly the same drive that I know and trust, it is hard to consider any other option than another WD Red 4TB. Make sure you purchase your drive from Amazon and not an Amazon market place seller. Check your warranty status as soon as you receive your drive and return it if WD does not recognize the full three years you are entitled to. If you compare price to size in the WD Red line, you will see that the 4TB size is by far the most economical. I am going to buy a second drive for general use. If the current pricing holds, I am going to buy six more of these to replace all of the drives in my ZFS system over the next year.

I have two WD clouds. I have a WD EX4100 and a PR4100. Both units are 4 bays with 6 TB each. After several years of service Drive one failed in both units within a few months of each other. The model was actually WD60EFRX but I was sent WD60EFZX which is the Red Pro which is apparently WDs replacement for the older RX Red. I was skeptical but I put the disk into the bay and the rebuild went as advertised over the course of a day or so and it is as good as new and maybe a little faster as the cache is a little bigger if I am not mistaken. Interestingly, the packages I received were both labled as the RX but the actual drive was the ZX. Amazon was more than happy to do a return and made it easy as pie but I decided to keep the extra one I ordered as a spare. Although there was some mislabeling, it was not Amazons fault and all is well that ends well.

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.