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

Lets get this out of the way first, Im kind of a WD fanboy but with good reason I think. Ive been using them for as long as I can remember, and maybe its just my personal luck but I think theyve been better to me than any other brand. The only ones I dont really like are the Green drives, and Im willing to accept that they are perfectly fine as external drives that arent being constantly accessed. The Green is in mega power saving mode and loves to spin down, which means youre looking at longer access times and more wear and tear if you leave it plugged in and access it frequently. I wanted to punch my monitor every time I waited the magical 5 minutes (or whatever it is) before clicking on what I needed, just to wait several seconds on the drive to spin back up. I dont currently use NAS or RAID but considering my options this seemed like my best bet for frequently accessed mass storage, and I was at one point considering RAID (still am kind of). Black is better, faster, and as such costs more, but I couldnt justify it since I have an SSD for things that need to be fast. I bought this 4TB Red to put in my computer and replace a 3TB Green external drive I was using. Ive had it since August of 2014 which isnt that long at this point but its given me zero reason to complain, same as the 3TB Red I bought in October to replace a 1TB Blue. The only thing Ive noticed that was cause for concern at first is these things seem to be a little louder than your standard WD Blue or Green drive on read and write operations, and I thought I may have gotten one with a defect. Im not sure why that is, but I was much less concerned about it when I got the second drive and it sounded about the same. They seem to have quietened down some with use, and again they have given me no issues whatsoever. Ill definitely be buying more of these when the time comes. UPDATE 6/30/2015 Just wanted to say I am still running a 4tb and a 3tb WD Red in my computer and theyve been absolutely trouble free. One of them seems to make a short quiet buzzing noise every now and then that sounds out of place if youre used to diagnosing bad drives by sound like Ive had to do on many occasions, but every test Ive run comes up clean and Ive had no issues whatsoever out of either drive. Chkdsk, SMART, and benchmarks are clean and consistent and I use these daily as secondary drives for all my storage and most of my games. I really cant recommend these highly enough. That being said, I always feel the need to tell people KEEP BACKUPS. Any drive can fail and its always painful when it happens if you dont have regular backups. Its not cheap to match storage space for backups but trust me... That one day you need it -- and you will one day or one year unless you replace your drives regularly -- its money well spent.

Update 1/24/14 - WD has posted a utility (WD Red SMART load/Unload utility)on the support download page for this drive that supposedly installs a firmware update to help with this problem. I have not tried it but it appears to be specifically designed for these drives and their high head parking issue. Update 1/11/14 - Just received and tested my 2nd drive from Amazon. It also was received with the Idle3 timer set to 8 seconds. I used the Wdidle3 program from WD to reset this timer to 300 seconds and then tested the drive using the WD Diagnostics Utility. Drive tested fine. For reference, both of these drives that came with the Idle3 timer set for 8 seconds were WD part number: WD30EFRX-68EUZN0. I have seen some indication on other web sites that this issue may be unique to drives with the -68EUZN0 part number. ========= My issue is a brand new WD30EFRX from Amazon that out of the box has the Idle3 timer set to 8 seconds. When installed in my ReadyNAS Ultra 4 it climbed to 1200 LCCs in the 1st 24 hours. Since the unit is only rated for 600,000 LCCs in its lifetime at this rate it would reach its specified rating in a little over a year. Based on the responses from WD below, I am forced to modify these drives using the WDIDDLE3 tool prior to installation in my NAS to give them any chance of lasting for the full 3-year warranty period. I have had a couple of email exchanges with WD Technical Support on this, the latest being today. I asked them 3 questions and have posted their responses below. Questions to WD Technical Support and their replies below 1. Is there something wrong with this drive? At the current rate of head parking this drive will reach a count of somewhere in the 2-3 million cycles before the 3 year warranty period is reached. If WD really believes that the drives can survive this many parking cycles why do you only list 600,000 in your specification? Since this will be 4-5 times the specified value it does appear something is wrong with the drive. (WD Response) Some utilities, operating systems, and applications, such as some implementations of Linux, for example, are not optimized for low power storage devices and can cause our drives to wake up at a higher rate than normal. This effectively negates the power-saving advantages of low-power drives, such as Western Digitals WD Red, and artificially increases the number of load-unload cycles. They also stated in another email that To date, we have had no reported hard drive failures due to cycle and load times with any of our drives. 2. Should the Idle3 timer have been set to 8 seconds when I received it? I have seen several other postings and test data/reviews on the internet where people state when they received their WD30EFRX the Idle3 timer was disabled? (WD Response) - They did not answer this question 3. Is there something I can do to reduce the LCC concern and increase the life of this drive if I am still concerned about it? I have seen several posts where people claim that using the WDIDLE3 tool works OK, but it is not listed as a drive for this tool on the WD web site. Is this tool OK to use or is there something else that can be done to change this operation? (WD Response) - The WDIddle3 utility has not been designed for this particular product. However, weve seen cases where customers have used the tool with this internal drive and managed to set Idle3 to max time which effectively turns off load/unload power saving feature. Please also find the link for the WDiddle3 utility which should allow you to set the WDiddle 3 for your needs. [...] Note that this is version 1_05. I have seen references to a version 2.0...., but have never been able to find a copy of it. The link they sent me is for version 1_05 and it worked fine for me. I have used the WDIDDLE3 (version 1_05) tool to set the Idle3 timer on my WD30EFRX to 300 seconds and so far I have only had a couple of LCC increases in a few days. Although this is a pain to deal with, I still believe this is a good drive for the NAS application and have another drive on order. It will be interesting to see if it also has the Idle3 timer set to 8 seconds when I receive it. If it does I will also change it to 300 seconds.

I purchased 2 of the 3TBs - put them in a Synology DS713+, ran SMART tests (checked out OK) and then put them to use. They were significantly quieter than the WD Black 2TBs I previously had in the Synology. Approx 7 days later the Synology notified me that the volume had failed. The quick SMART test said OK for both. I then ran the extended SMART test, with one of the drives hanging up at 90% for several hours. I removed the HDD in question and re-ran the extended SMART test in a Windows PC using Western Digitals diagnostic utility that I downloaded from their website. The HDD subsequently failed testing with a bunch of bad sectors. I received my replacement drive 1 day after initiating the return process (gotta love Amazon). I tested the replacement HDD in a PC before before installing it in the NAS. The new HDD was fine and has been in service with no issues to-date. Ive had many WD HDDs (mainly Blacks) over the years and this is the first one Ive had go south on me within the warranty period...so I suppose Ive been very lucky in that regard. My two takeaways from this: It really does appear to be the luck of the draw with these particular HDDs if you going to get a good one vs a DOA. When I think about the rough handling (being tossed into back of trucks, etc) these HDDs are subjected to during the shipping process, it actually surprises me that their fail rate isnt higher. The low bang for the buck with these Reds makes them a gamble Im prepared to take (I wouldnt be quite so open minded if Id spent the $$ on the SEs or REs and this was happening). From now on I plan on using the WD diagnostic utility to run extended SMART tests on any new drive before putting them into service. This is especially imperative for NAS drives - use the WD util in a Windows PC before installing them into the NAS (in my case it was far quicker & accurate to do this vs using the NAS to do the SMART test). Ive also scheduled weekly extended SMART tests in the Synology (once bitten, twice...) Lesson learned and Ill continue to be a WD customer.

If you compare ratings, most of these drives from the leading competitors are neck to neck. In the 4TB category, I went with WD RED NAS drives because they have a lot of good time-tested-metrics that show theyre worth it. Not just immediate out of the box stuff. But a few years now, of tried and true testing. If you want a reliable (consumer level reliable) always-on drive, the RED NAS drives are the way to go for cost. I almost got a Seagate NAS drive, but ultimately the REDs came out on top. There are more reliable drives out there, enterprise level. But if youre just looking for large storage capacity, with reliability of being on a lot and being used a lot, the REDs are a great way to go. Do not put all your eggs in one basket. No drive is fool proof. They will fail eventually. Might be a year. Might be 10 years. Dont gamble with important data. Always have a backup of your data. I use mine a data backup of photos, large sums of data. These are cheap enough to make that a non-issue at $140 per 4TB drive. If youve never used something larger than 2TB in your windows platform, make sure you read up on how to accommodate & use this size partition. It will depend on your motherboard, which version of windows youre using, and how you intend to format this drive. I run windows 7 64bit on a bulldozer based motherboard. So for me, I simply plopped it in, went to the drive in Computer Management under Admin Tools, changed the drive to GTP instead of MBR, and made a new volume with the entire capacity, then formatted it with my filesystem. Good to go.

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 recently purchased four of these drives to make a new storage array in my workstation. I connected them in two pairs of Raid Mirror on a PCI controller board (with a backup controller) and then using windows to negotiate nightly backups between the two of them. Ive owned numerous western digital hard drives over the years and theyve hands-down been the most reliable. I was unsure about the Red Series of drives, however so far theyve been behaving well. Pros; Extremely high capacity-to-price ratio. Only exceeded by the Green series drives (which I would avoid due to performance issues) Sata 3 interface (not that this will saturate a sata channel, but its still nice) Large Cache 3 year Warranty Cons; I had been looking at using 2.5 drives due to heat, electricity and weight savings. WD doesnt make 2.5 drives anywhere near this large and they are prohibitively expensive per GB Theyre heavy. While normally not a huge consideration, for me it was, bear with me. It would be nice to have a 5 year warranty It would nice if they were fixed 7200 rpm drives, or at least if this was settable for those of us that want to keep out drives spinning all the time. Overall though; Unless you want to buy RE4 Enterprise level drives I would get these again. I will update this with any issues I have. NO MATTER WHAT THIS DOES NOT SUBSTITUTE A WELL THOUGHT OUT BACKUP SOLUTION. EVER. Seriously, go back your stuff up, RIGHT NOW.

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.

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.

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).

Our famaly TiVo kept getting filled quickly with all the holiday recording and other shows that everyone wanted to record. Was looking at upgrading the TiVo Roamio but the new TiVo software is not exactly great. Instead we opting in upgrading the hard drive. Process was simple and just needed torx screw driver. Removed original 500GB and replaced with 3TB. Once installed TiVo did it’s full set-up and had to configured again. If you have FiOS you will need to have the cablecard reloaded with host, prod, and card ID. Just do a chat and they can do it in about 5 minutes. Update: 12/5/19 So far it has worked with no issues and have so much recordings and only %22 full. Overall very happy with the purchase. On advise is when opening make sure to use a air duster to clean up the fan and inside of TiVo unit. It will extend the life as well ensure it runs cool. Update: 2/17/2021 The hard drive still going strong with no issues. It’s about nearly 75% full based on all the recording series set on TiVo. My 2nd TiVo with original 500GB died this week so will be replacing with 2TB. Overall very happy with purchase.