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

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.

Just bought 2 drives advertised as Used: Like New | Details Sold by TechnoDealsUSA These drive pass all the S.M.A.R.T test but they have both be run for 48,000+ hours virtually non stop. That is over 5.5 years. I would not exactly call them Like New. I only saved about 20% buying used over new. I hope I dont regret this.

Im not sure I understand the marketing concept of a Red Drive, but I live in a Red State so... Anyway these drives are low power, cool, and quiet. Compared to the WD Black drives, they are a dream come true. I had been using black drives on my desktop and in a USB holder and they made so much noise and vibration I simply dont understand how they can function. I gave the USB mounted drive to my son to put into his computer and went Red. The red drives are silent, have no vibration, and the performance hit is minimal. From what I can tell, they spin down to low RPM when not in use, but they do not stop. This allows them to spin up much faster than drives that are stopped. Even at full use they are very low energy devices. By comparison a Black WD drive will be HOT to the touch. These stay at room temperature without a fan! I think the Red product line is the future of hard drives. I fully expect these drives will dramatically outlast their warranty, and I would wager that the application of higher end mechanical construction like that used in the higher performance drives could result in the industries first 10 year warranty. My view is that the red product line is serious SSD competition, and with the application of some systems technology, hard drives will never be replaced by SSDs, until we can store data in a true crystalline structure that does not need rocket science to fix the errors created by use. Ive been in the computer industry consuming hard drives since the 5 MByte hard drives were high tech (thats not a typo, 5 Megabytes), and these drives are the best. Eventually I hope to replace everything here with them primarily because of the power savings and performance. Power consumption effects everything from your UPC performance to your electric bill to your noise budget from high capacity fans. Marketing could do a much better job on these red drives - for instance I bet they pay for themselves over other drives in power savings in time; I doubt they require fans in many home applications especially if the fans are modulated by the drives temperature sensors; and the lack of vibration and noise is a huge plus. Although I maintain a triple level backup strategy (called experience), I have not encountered any issues in spite of continuous use 24/7 for Windows (which is a frightening OS for disk usage). /Len

Purchased 26 of the 4TB drives from Mar - May of 2015 for a small home build using FreeNAS and a 24 bay Supermicro chassis. All drives were purchased through Prime and Amazon.com Services, Inc, no 3rd party sellers. I registered every drive in May or 2015. These drives have been running 24/7 with over 35000 hours running with temps ranging between 23-26*C in a below-grade basement server room. During this time Ive had just 2 drives begin to fail with READ errors, 1 in 2017 and another in 2018. No data was lost and only a few warning errors popped up before removing. I filled out the online replacement forms, printed them off, packed up the drives after swapping out with a spare and shipped them off. WD send brand new replacement (not reconditioned) drives back to be both times. Iirc I had the replacements within 2 weeks or sending them in. Drives are now out of warranty of course but Really.. what more can one wish or hope for! Still have 3 brand new drives if any issues arise. Im currently in the process of ordering the newer 8TB WD Red drives now to begin replacing these aging (but still working 100%) 4TB drives. Couple of months I should have 26 of the 8TB drives to start replacing these ones. Looking forward to the increased drive space but also knowing I have the most rock solid drives one could hope for! Worked in the IT field before retiring and have dealt with both PC and Server hardware from end users in their home, to local and national service providers, to full on massive data centers. Have used pretty much every manufactures drive available over the years. Ive always been extremely happy with Western Digital products and service.

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.

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.

Update: 2016/10/10 - Amazon is accepting a return of the drives with the miss matching serial number. I bought the same drive advertised from Frys Electronics. My issue was unrelated to the drive itself. Im changing this to a 5 star because I am using the same type of drive without issue. WD tech support willing to help resolve my issue. For that I give my compliments to WD tech support. Update: 2016/10/01 - Im currently working with WD on this issue. I expect that Ill be changing this to a 5 star review in the near future. It turns out that the root of my problem was that both drives received were improperly packaged in the wrong box.The box had the correct SN and it did have the correct warranty for these drives. ___ Im giving this a 1 star because when I called W.D., they said both of my drives are OEM hard drives and that any RMA requests would have to go though the manufacture of the computer it was sold in. Im very confused by this because it the item isnt listed as OEM. If you buy one of these drives, register your device to verify it isnt an OEM drive. I bought a WD Red 3TB on 9/27/2016 (Received on 9/28) - Dead on Arrival - ASRock Motherboard bios wouldnt detect it. - ASUS Bios wouldnt detect it. (Used SATA cable / power that i used for a different drive) - Unraid 6 and Windows 64bit device manager wouldnt detect it. - External hard drive dock didnt work. - Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows didnt detect it (using SATA port). - Called WD support and they told me the drive is bad. That I can do an RMA or return to amazon. I returned to amazon for a replacement. Replacement arrived 9/29 - Dead on Arrival (This time it shows up in bios, but makes clicking sounds after spin up. I speculate the clicking sounds are made when the computer is attempting to access the drive.) - Booted into ASRock bios. The drive name did show up. (Details about the drive including smart were unknown) - In windows device manager it showed the drive as unknown and not initialized. I would expect that, so I attempted to initialize the disk. Windows gave me an unknown path error. I didnt expect it to work, because the drive was making clicking sounds. 9/29: I called WD support again, this time to discuss the second drive. I provided the Serial Number of both drives to WD and they said the drives are OEM. OEM drives are not covered under the WD warranty. That the two drives I had were sold to a manufacture. That I would have to go though the manufacture to get a replacement under that manufacturers warranty. Im rather confused at this point because this item is sold by Western Digital according to the Amazon product page. Ive saved the S/N of the drives in case WD responds to this post wanting them. Personal Opinion: I bought WD Red for my Unraid6 server to build out a NAS due to the higher levels of vibrations when next to other HDDs. I find it very odd to have two hard drives DOA. If I heard someone else saying that, i would speculate that they had a bad cable or didnt know how to set up a new hard drive in their PC. Based on the reviews of the drive, Im going to assume that this is more of an isolated case. I would of forgiven this product for the failures due to the many unknowns during shipping. The only thing I couldnt excuse and the reason for the 1 star was that the dive didnt have a warranty according to WD because it is an OEM drive. Note on shipping: The hard drive box is marked as fragile, but that is contained within a generic amazon box. So the fragile warnings are not visible when the item is shipped. This could explain why the hard drives were damaged. Update: 2016/01/10 - Im in the process of packaging the 2 HDs to return. Ive discovered that the S/N on the boxes do not match the drives they shipped with. WD has replied to my review. I will be calling them and updating the review after. Update: 2016/10/01 - Ive contacted both WD and Amazon about the issue. Amazon noted on my return that the SNs wont match.

Usually love WD, disappointed it died a few days after Amazons 30 day warranty and they wont even consider it. We are talking 3 days... Will try to get a replacement through WD but there are already warnings on WDs site that they are behind in replacing drives..... Update: 5/18 - WARNING WARNING WARNING.... Western Digital is claiming these are OEM drives (even though it isnt listed anywhere in their description) and WILL NOT HONOR A WARRANTY. Buy at your own risk because they will not replace it!!!!!!!! Very disappointed in Western Digital and these dirty tactics and Very disappoint in AMAZON for allowing the Bait & Switch- False Advertising!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Update 5/19 - Western Digital says my drive is OEM and made in 2014. So they are selling 9 year old drives as new and not OEM. Amazon allows them to continue this fraud. Amazon wont stand behind the product that failed 32 days in. Western Digital wont replace it because of the OEM. And the Seller claims they cant replace it because Amazon has all their stock. DO NOT BUY THIS!!!! SCAM

Over the years Ive purchased several WD red drives for my Synology home NAS. I started with the 4TB, then moved up to 6TB and finally 8TB. I havent had a chance to try the 10TBs yet, since the price is still up there unless you REALLY need the space (time of writing is mid-2018). But Im sure Ill get there eventually. Prior to the reds being available, I purchased many of the WD green drives (at least 7 at last count). Unfortunately, the greens were not designed for NAS use, so you had to find a Linux system to plug the drive into to change a firmware setting to disable a 300 second idle timeout... the drives idling repeatedly in a 24-hour environment after many months of use would eventually add additional wear and tear on the greens that would reduce their overall lifespan significantly. The reds were definitely a nice addition to the WD lineup, as they were the first budget drive from WD that were specifically designed for (home) NAS use... no firmware tweaks necessary. OK, enough of the history lesson. I would rate the WD green drives as being very reliable, but not perfect. I believe I received one that was DOA, which was an easy process with Amazon to ship back and replace. During many years of operation (my first green was purchased in 2009 and is still going strong today after continuous use for almost 9 years), I only had 1 drive that failed in my NAS. It disconnected from the array, which immediately degraded the RAID. The drive that failed was not the oldest drive that I owned, so I ran the SMART tests and everything came back A-OK. I let the Synology rebuild the RAID array with the failed drive, and everything seemed to be working for a couple of months... until it disconnected again. This was a good indication that it was time to replace the drive, which I did. OK, so Ive had a pretty good history with WD drives. Getting back to the reds, I own at least 6 of them in various capacities. First, let me say that none have ever failed outright or caused any data loss in my system, so overall their track record is great. However, both of the 6TB reds that Ive purchased have had multiple disk re-identification events in my NAS. These re-identification events have not caused any data loss, nor do they require a rebuild of the RAID array. Synology says that re-identification events are an early warning sign that the drive could fail, so to keep an eye on these events to see if theyre increasing in frequency... if so its probably time to replace the drive(s) to avoid any potential data loss. On both of my 6TB reds, Im averaging about 1 disk re-identification event every 12 to 18 months, so Im not overly concerned. Ive never seen any strange events (re-identification, re-connection, bad sectors, etc.) on any of the 4TB or 8TB reds that I own, so this problem seems to be specific to the 6TB model (or its a huge coincidence). My 6TB reds were purchased in 2014 and 2015, so its possible that whatever was causing the issue was corrected. I have the 6TB reds loaded into a backup NAS, but I will personally not be purchasing any more of them. YMMV. Overall Im giving these drives 4 stars. If possible, Id give 3 stars to the 6TB reds (simply due to the anxiety factor), and 5 stars to the other reds (well, at least the 4TB and 8TB, which Ive had personal experience with), but Amazon does not allow for split review ratings.

I ordered 3 of these back in October of last year to use in my HTPC. Recently I was running out of space and ordered another one along with 3 - 4TB Greens for a backup solution. Upon reading up about the greens, which I had never ordered before, I learned about WDs WDIDLE3 utility that some people are using to set the Head Park timer from 8 seconds to 5 minutes and thus reducing the amount of times the heads park. Since the Greens are only rated at 300k cycles, you could see how quickly those would add up of they are parking every 8 seconds after use. On a whim, I decided to check the new Red drive I just purchased to see what its timer was set to, it was 5 minutes. I then checked the Red drives I purchased here from Amazon back in October of last year, the same 4TB model as the one I just ordered. To my surprise, all 3 were set to 8 seconds and my head park count was already at 18k in a matter of months. I used the utility and set those to 5 minutes as well. Performance of the drive was not really what I bought them for, but they seem to be fine. Their not Black drives and 7200 RPMs, so their not as quick as what I have in my gaming machine, but they work just fine for my HTPC.