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 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.

I am a big fan of these WD Red NAS drives as I have several synology servers. Ive had pretty good luck with WD Black drives as those are extremely solid (and fast compared to these and the WD Greens), but these run significantly hotter which raises the overall temp of my NAS devices. The WD Green drives run cooler (and just about as fast as these WD Red drives), but are not good for NAS environments due to the TLER issue (they constantly spin up and down which adds needless wear and tear and will ultimately reduce the longevity of your drive). These arent the fastest drives out there, but they offer the perfect balance and are safe for use in NAS systems. I also had a lot of success with Samsung drives, but these were bought out by Seagate and, while I respect Seagates quality control, they are not comparible with SMART diagnostics, which is how synology units (and most diagnostic protocols) monitor the health of your drive. While my one seagate drive in operation has never failed me, I dont appreciate the fact that when and if it ever does, I will have zero warning. Therefore, I stick with WD drives so that I can monitor their health and replace them when and if they start developing bad sectors. Seagate seems to have done away with SMART compatibility so that end users could not diagnose the drives themselves. They probably got tired of people trying to RMA drives because of a single bad sector. So Seagate users are forced to use Seatools to examine their drives, which gives you only a passing (or failing grade) with no gray area in between (i.e. no hints that your drive is about to fail as long as it is still operating within what Seagate considers acceptable parameters). Its a shame too because my one Seagate drive is among the fastest I own and has worked solidly for 3+ years. I just dont completely trust it without the SMART data.

The short summary: these work great for bulk file storage in the home--built to be continually powered up and to store large amounts of data for the home user, power user, or small business. Ive got a love-hate relationship with WD: their USB drives have been problematic and disappointing, but the Caviar Black internal drives have run very well for RAID 0 / RAID 5 gaming in my desktop PCs. I bought these Red volumes to fill in the slots in a home server that had a RAID 1 array where a member had died...it turned out to be cheaper to buy three 4TB volumes, start over, and gain a ton more space than to try to dig up an exact match for the bad drive and still keep a smaller array. This time around, I used Windows Storage Spaces, a feature in Windows 8 and above. On Windows 10 64-bit I was able to set up a large storage space with Parity and use it for my system backups. Western Digital have done a good job making it easier to understand all these drives, and if you stop by their site, youll see what the color codes mean (like Green for everyday desktop, Purple for surveillance systems). If youre big on the details with hard drives, you know that the way theyre built makes some better for gaming, some for large files, some for continuous writes, etc. The Red series is for storage: the kind you stick in a file server and expect them to be running 24/7 or for long periods of time, and youre not needing super-fast response time. Theyve been running continuously since I installed them and a periodic temperature check doesnt seem to indicate theyre overheating and getting stressed. So far Ive been happy with the ease of use of the WD Red 4TB NAS desktop hard drives. They were fairly cheap, they do the job, and I suspect theyll last me for quite a while in my home server.

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.

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.

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.

Quiet and easy to install, and stores as much as is rated. So whats not to like? Well, these things are no good if it fails! I have had these Red Plus HDDs to fail, either by overheating or by something wrong with its on-board circuitry, within a year or two of installation. Thats unacceptable even in a RAID 5 or 6 configuration - and if this had been in a JBOD configuration, who knows what I might have lost? I got this only because I thought I needed it to put into a Western Digital MyCloud Pro NAS server. The Walled Garden paradigm is obsolete. WD seems to know a good (or at least passable) deal about server hardware and software - but not enough about the disks that go into it. If you want disks that will NOT fail, go for Seagate instead.

This purchase was made as a replacement for the same drive that had recently failed after about 2 years of backup-only use. I do not test the drive for speed, as thats not its purpose (I have WD Blacks and SSDs for that). Im purchasing strictly for reliability. So why the 3 stars? Pros: - The drive offers good capacity at reasonable prices - Designed for use in NAS or other similar applications - Runs seemingly cool Cons: - I had one fail not too long into its life (e.g., ~2 years) - That warranty is potentially useless if, like me, you are nervous about sending a non-wiped drive back to WD for replacement. I will elaborate on the concern... I contacted WD about the failed drive, and they readily were willing to replace it. That being said, since the drive has failed (clicking sounds, etc.), it is impossible for me to get it to mount, and therefore it is impossible for me to erase the drive. I suspect that with very little effort, someone with a little hardware expertise -- e.g., lots of people at WD -- could get the drive working again and have ready access to all my info. Give this 4TB drive is the clone of my entire digital life, I just wasnt comfortable sending the drive back to the company. And of course, if I were to crack the thing open, Id void the warranty. Ive read lots of views online about WDs policies and procedures on protecting info, but when it came down to risking all my info, I wasnt able to pull the trigger on the exchange. For other utilitarian data, Id have no such qualms. Obviously, this is a personal choice and you may be more trusting than me. In which case, paying a little extra for a 5 year warranty makes sense. So consider what you would do in a similar situation as mine. If you have come to view spinning-platter drives as disposable items, consider saving a bit of money and buying something with a shorter warranty -- particularly in an application like mine (a clone) where its easy to swap a new drive in. Undoubtedly you will pay less per TB in a year or two. Or youll go SSD if the pricing is finally right.

These have been rock solid for several months in a Synology NAS. They are running nearly continuously backing up multiple computers on my LAN. While seeks are occasionally loud, they are about as quiet as a whisper while spun up, and create no noticeably vibration. Even if you touch the mount with your hand. They really DO engineer this differently for use in a multi-disk NAS. Its only been a month (Ill update as time goes on) but so far there have been no misreads or bad sectors. For what its worth, I have had absolutely none of the issues with the high cycle counts that others have seen. I didnt have to upgrade the firmware, either. So, perhaps the issue is fixed. Even with my NAS fan set to quiet these have been running fairly cool. The highest temp Ive seen is 90 degrees F, and thats during summer in a room that is kept at about 86 degrees. So, pretty cool all things considered! The only potential downside to these is that in order to get them so quiet and efficient, the spindle speed is rather low: 5400 RPM. Like all drives, the 3 GB/s max transfer speed is meaningless. Youll never get that except for a cache hit on a small amount of data, and that will almost never happen because your computer will probably have cached it, too. In terms of sustained transfer, Im running RAID 5 with four disks and Ive never seen reads faster than about 100 MB/s. I suspect 7200 RPM drives would be able to support much faster RAID reads. Despite the fact that these arent designed to be the quickest drives out there, Im extremely happy with them so far and they have been a great value. When I run out of space I plan to upgrade the NAS to the 6 TB version of these.

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.