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 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.

If you can still find one that they are not gouging for, buy it. Its not that quiet but it its better than the 7200 RPM drives, spins up fast and runs cool. Fast enough for my home media server and would be really fast in a striped RAID. Time will tell how long it lasts.

Both drives came well packet and undamaged. Did thorough block check and both came back as good. Installed them in NAS with two other matching drives I got a few weeks back. Total four WD Red 3TB NAS drives now. Made sure at latest firmware, also turned head parking off. Used zfs raidz2 with lz4 compression. I now have 5.2TB of space that can stand an any two drive failure. Getting uncompressed transfer speeds over 170MBs. They are quite and cool. Very happy so far. 12-30-2015. Had a drive fail out of the four in my NAS. I used ZFS mirrored stripes, raind10, with four of these drives. Bad drive was spitting CRC errors to console. Tried different cabels and controller. Still error. Ordered another drive and problem is gone. Now. RMA from WD website. Decided to rebuild NAS from scratch, after backup of course. New version of ZFS . now my scrub speed is 248MB. 4/4/2016. Purchased two more of these and added another mirrored vdev to my stripe. 3TB more usable space and the speed of an extra spindle. I plan on getting two more in a few weeks for the total of 8 drives in 4 mirrored vdevs all in one stripe. It wont keep my 10Gb network busy but im getting 350MB in transfers across the wire now. hoping to get over 400MB when I ad the last 2 drives. Update 8/10/2016 - I know have 8 WD drives are on a Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 Add-on Card, 8-Channel SAS/SATA Adapter with 600MB/s per Channel in a PCIE x16 running at x8 on a Supermicro ATX DDR4 LGA 1151 C7Z170-OCE-O Motherboard with 64GB DDR4 RAM. I am running CentOS 7 kernel 4.7 with Btrfs 4.7 and btrfs-prods 4.7. I have the 8 drives in a RAID10 btrfs pool. I also have my PC and ESXi server attached to this NAS via Intel CNA 10Gb dual port cards using SFP+ DACs. I am getting non cached reads/writes at over 500MB via windows smd share. Smooth line at that i might add. My ESXi server has a NFS mount to the pool were I store most of my guest images. 8 seconds for a non cache Windows Server 2012 image to boot to login screen. Oh ya, cached reads/writes are 1.2GBs (1,200MB) over my network, yikes scoob! Update 01/25/2017 - I know have 11 of these drives. 8 of them are in my NAS, 2 in PC running RAID1, and another spare in the box in-case i have drive go bad. They are not fastest drives but work well for me.

The drive is old, manufactured 2017-Feb-05, but arrived quickly sealed in original packaging. At first power-on, SMART showed no errors and zero previous run time. The drive is relatively quiet - I did not take actual SPL measurements but it is more quiet (especially on head seek operations) than similar sized Seagate drives and about the same as similar sized Samsung and Toshiba drives. A full drive write and read completed without trouble. The drive is used in a hot-swap cage, powered up periodically to run backup operations, and is jostled and moved occasionally. So far no troubles.

All hard drives eventually burn out, and that will be a big deciding factor on how good this one was when it happens. For now, its all about the capacity and speed, which are good. I have a large array of hard drives that I use as multiple backups for my file system, which includes a lot of RAW and Photoshop photography files and video footage that I shoot. Whenever a hard drive fails, I replace it, recopy the backup it held, and move on. Whenever that happens, I also upgrade to larger drives available at the time to expand my library size. At this point, I should state clearly that Ive always been a Seagate buyer, but have some WDs in my system because they came with the last couple of machines that I didnt build from scratch, and they seem to work just fine. So, this WD drive looked like a pretty good deal, and I decided to go ahead and buy it. This has a nice large capacity, and has proven to be plenty fast for storage and Photoshop work, and also for working with my video files while editing and so forth, so Im happy with that. What I wasnt very happy with is that it wasnt inherently recognized by my computer for the full 4TB, but only 2TB. I contacted WDD about it, and after going over the very high specs of my computer and trying a few fixes, a tech had me wipe the drive using the write all zeros method, which took several hours, and re-try. That didnt work. Another session with tech support, and they determined that I needed to box it up and send it to them for replacement. I was all set to do that, when I decided to try one more thing before sending it to WD: I downloaded the latest Seagate SeaTools for Windows to see if it could help me resolve the problem. Within a few minutes, it was all resolved and I was all set with the full 4TB. The fact that I had to go to a different hard drive manufacturer and get their software tool to resolve this problem puts a bad taste in my mouth toward WD, specifically toward their customer service / tech support. In short, they got it wrong twice, had no tool of their own for me to download to solve it, wanted me to box it up and send it to them for replacement, which would probably have just put me right back where I started when the new drive arrived, and didnt volunteer that I try their competitors SeaTools software to fix the problem. Im thinking from here on out, Ill just go back to buying Seagate for my hard drive replacements.

It is a typical Western Digital Hard drive. Not a whole lot to say. The one it replaced in a NAS lasted 7 years. Anything over 5 - 7 years is what you can most likely expect from these drives.

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 am not a computer wizard. I installed this drive with 5 other drives in my large tower. I formatted the drive. It worked perfectly. I did not measure speed or any other parameters. I just know that it works to store my movies, music, and photographs. I only gave it 4 stars because I simply dont know its level of performance, meaning speed. As far as I am concerned it works as fast as I need it to work. This drive replaced a WD green 2 TB drive that had failed. I only got 3 years out of that 2 TB drive. I expect more. However, from reading reviews it is obvious that all the brands of hard drives have some sort of failure rate. I went for the red version because it is supposed to be built a little better. I hope so. BTW when that 2 TB WD storage drive failed, I got the BSD that told me that my system drive had failed and I needed to reinstall my operating system. I did not believe that blue screen that appeared under Windows 7. I began disconnecting storage drives until I found one that when disconnected allowed my computer to boot up perfectly. I then plugged this drive in hot and looked to see if I need anything left on it. Most of my folders were missing and those that were still there I did not need. So I just broke off the connectors and threw it in the garbage.

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

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.