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

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.

Bought this drive because I leave my computer on 24/7. So far, it is very quiet and runs as cool as my Samsung and Hitachi drives. It took less than a couple of minutes using Windows Disk feature from Administrative Tools to format and partition the drive. Since I installed it, It has been working very well without any noticeable sounds or heat issues. I was concerned about buying the other Western Digital or Seagate Hard drives due to all the negative reviews from other customers. I bought the Red Hard drive because it is made to run for long extended period of time. As of today, I am very happy with the drive. Amazon.com packed it very well which kept it from being DOA when I received it. Update: 01/07/2013 Since installing this NAS hard drive in my tower, when you boot up to restore a system image from another hard drive in your computer case, it wont recognize it. It only recognizes the NAS drive. I needed to put my system Image backup on my NAS drive to be able to be recognized during boot up or repair function of Windows 7 or 8. If you have a network, then it wont be a problem but if you dont, be aware that, at least on my computer, it will only recognize the NAS drive during boot up when it comes to restoring your backup. The NAS drive has an embedded program so that it can be used in a Network type of computer configuration but looks like it isnt meant to be installed in a Non-Networked Computer case. Update: July 2017 - This hard drive has been working 24/7/365 days since I installed it in 2012. Absolutely no problems up to now. I did have the above mentioned issues, but with Windows 10 Pro it is a NON-ISSUE about restoring your Window Backup Image from this drive. It is recognized and works perfectly. I am very happy that it has lasted for over five years without any problems. Most Hard drives usually give up the ghost in less time than this drive. I definitely will repurchase another RED WD drive for backup purposes in the future.

Why 4 Stars instead of 5? The fact is that every mechanical hard drive will eventually fail depends on the usage and its manufacturing process control. However I can say these are the second most reliable drives. The at first place is HGST no doubt. If you are budget conscious, these are the best. I recommend to have same series drives in your NAS to get best performance and reliability. I was in habit to have a different capacity of the drives with multiple manufacturerers and ended up with frustration and no data loss thanks to the data protection and parity of the volume. I started to build my NAS with a set of 2x2TB drives and over time I increased my storage to 10TB with the same drives. Ill stick with 2TB drives to expand my storage until WD will stop manufacture not due to the fact that these are the cheapest, it is due to the fact of the existing set of drives. Im not even expecting any drive will last long as 5 years. The first set of drives which I bought is now surpassed more than three and half year and no bad sectors yet. Although Ill be expecting the first failure of the drive within a year. At the end, I say I didnt made a bad decision.

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.

The reviews Ive read on this drive seem to praise how quiet it is. A review on techreport.com even stated, The WD Red 4TB is remarkably quiet; it emanates a faint hum while idling, and its seek chatter is barely audible from a few inches away.. I would agree that they are quiet while idling, but I have to say that as far as the seek chatter goes, this is not what I have experienced. I purchased 2 4TB drives from Amazon to put in my QNAP TS-251+ NAS. During certain times like booting up, launching certain apps, and copying file, I can hear the seek chatter from 10-15 feet away. In comparison, I have a 3TB WD My Passport drive that I would definitely say is quiet. I cant hear any noticable seek chatter from that even when Im right next to it. To put some proof behind what I was hearing, I put a decibel meter about 6 away from the NAS. The increase between when the drive was just iding and when it was seeking was on average about 5 dB with a peak around 7-8 dB. For those not familiar with the decibel scale, an increase of 10 dB means it is twice as loud. I decided to exchange the drives for 2 others, and unfortunately those sound just like the first 2 that I received. All 4 of the drives were manufactured in Oct 2015. Now Im not saying that its really loud, just that it is louder than I was led to believe it would be, especially since the 3TB WD Passport drive I have is not like this at all. So there are only 2 things I can conclude from this: 1. This seek chatter noise is normal for these drives and my expectations were just too high. (And maybe the NAS enclosure is amplifying the sound a bit) 2. I have bad luck and I have stumbled across a noisy batch of drives

So far this drive has performed exactly as Id hoped. Some notes: (1) WD Red drives have a 3 year warranty while the WD Green drives have a 2 year warranty. For the extra 10-20 dollars for the 4TB version (when I bought this), the extra year is totally worth it. Friendly tip: All businesses like set their warranties periods such that somewhere between 95-99% of all products sold wont need to be repaired/replaced. If WD is confident that they can give the Red an extra year over the Green, Ill pay the slight bit extra. (2) As with any HDD, I highly suggest that all users run a full disk check the minute they get the device out of the box. Ive been lucky not to have drives show up with any issues. However, the horror stories (Ive heard from friends and read here and on other sites) just make me overly cautious about the shipping and handling of such a delicate piece of hardware. If the full disk check (approx. 8-10 hours for 4TB) doesnt come back with any errors, contact the seller immediately. Again, I was lucky that mine didnt have any issues but I have had friends that found significant failures and had to deal with sending the device back. Better to know about it up front than find out 2 months down the line when the remorse period with the seller has past and your data may take weeks or months to recover if at all.

Ive got 4 of these running in RAIDZ1 in a TrueNAS Core machine I keep at my house as a backup to the main TrueNAS Core box I keep at my parents place. Theyve been running continuously for almost a year now, 312 days or 7492 hours. In that time, not a single error or fault has developed. All 4 drives were purchased right here and are in warranty through WD. No third-party OEM shenanigans here, at least for me I actually bought these right before the whole SMR debacle hit. These drives, the WD40EFRX were listed as the older model compared to the newer WD40EFAX. They were cheaper at the time too so I went for these instead of the newer drive which, upon first glance at the time, only had a smaller amount of cache. Wasnt worth the extra money because I was using these in RAIDZ with a large amount of RAM anyway. So, whatever I thought...boy did I luck out! The WD40EFRX is now listed as a WD Red Plus drive. Plus indicating its CMR instead of regular Red SMR drives. Newer isnt always better! - PSA: DO NOT BUY WD RED SMR DRIVES FOR USE IN A ZFS or HARDWARE RAID ENVIROMENT. YOU WILL HAVE PROBLEMS IF YOU HAVE TO REBUILD AN ARRAY AFTER DISK FAILURE. Purchase a CMR drive instead for this use case -

I would give these things a 1 star review just to get people to read this, but not this time. Ive bought these WD Red drives before. I consider WD substandard equipment, *HOWEVER* my theory is, if your backup system cant host substandard equipment, then you need another backup system. Ive been using OpenSolaris and these WD Reds for over a year now, and I can see that already Im getting some errors with two of the original drives. They both show about 7k+ errors when you look at the smart report (something you should be doing if you arent. Do yourself a favor and build smartctl if you dont already have it.). So I expect Ill be replacing those drives first. At any rate, I dont think I got any DOAs from Amazon so far. Im doing a surface analysis on the new ones to see what kind of shape they are in. But, these drives are priced pretty well at about $0.39/MB. You can probably do a little better, but these are pretty good drives. One other thing to consider when looking at drives: there are drives with higher capacities (4TB, 5TB, 6TB as of this review), but before you consider those too hard, realize that you are trusting your data to statistics no matter WHICH drive you buy. The ECCs that these drives run are large enough that you are guaranteed to get errors (yes, guaranteed), just by the sheer volume of bits they contain. There is no avoiding it. However, at 3TB, that is about the sensible limit where your ECC doesnt outstrip your data. On the larger drives, the same ECC is used (so its size doesnt become ridiculously large), but that means you are taking much more of a risk losing data. This website explains it better than I can: http://blog.fosketts.net/2014/12/19/big-disk-drives-require-data-integrity-checking/ , but it is one of the reasons I choose the 3TB drives vs just buying bigger drives. I might do so in the future, possibly, since ZFS is pretty good at protecting against bit rot, but for now, these drives are about the right drive for long term data storage.

These are just hard drives, but I really like the Reds because I know that I can just plug them in and not worry about them - reliable and very low noise/vibration. They cost more than alternatives, but they are work horses and my data is important. In that regard, they are a bargain. My only complaint (which is not significant enough to deserve a lower rating) is with WDs warranty/replacement process and Amazons extended warranty offerings - These are NAS drives. Im (personally, YMMV) using mine in RAID 1 configurations. I dont want to pay $15 for a data recovery plan (Amazon addon, not WD; thats what the RAID mirroring is for). If a drive fails, I just want the unit replaced. QUICKLY! Id rather have the option to buy one of those cheaper PC/Peripheral Protection Plans from SquareTrade (or whichever vendor is the best option for this sort of thing). If one fails under warranty, I just want a replacement ASAP with a return shipping label and NO HASSLE - I dont need to pay for someone to recover the data because I already have it, and I dont want to argue with some call center where English is not their native language. I just want it replaced now and I am willing to pay extra for that. At the very least, such a thing would be a nice addon/option. I try to avoid irritation whenever Im allowed, even if it costs me a bit more up front.

Its hard to tell how good a hard drive is until its been used for a bit. I got two of these drives for my aging NAS to increase the storage capacity from 1 TB to 4 TB. After about 5 years of use I decided to retire the older drives for now. The WD Red 4 TB was on the approved hardware list for my NAS, and is the maximum capacity for each bay, so I am hitting the upper limit for now. I still have two empty bays for further future expansion when it is needed. The older drives that came with my ReadyNAS were WD Green drives that were not specifically made for a NAS so as they got older I was getting worried that they might fail. It was easy to transfer data over to the new Red drives by simply pulling out one of the older drives which breaks the disc array. Once the new drive is mounted on the tray and slid back in the bay the NAS copies the information from the redundant drive and resets the disc array. Once that is completed do the same to the other disc. Now I have 3.6TB of redundant storage (you lose some space in the formatting process). The WD Red 4TB drives definitely run cooler than the Green drives that they replaced, and so far have not given me a bit a trouble. They also have a similar noise level to the Green drives, which was not bad at all even if you are sitting next to them. Even though these discs are rated at 5400 RPM they stream HD video from the Plex server without any problems. They have similar reading speeds to the older Green drives, which isnt the fastest, but my NAS doesnt have a fast processor in it either. While these discs have a 3 year warranty Im hoping that I get at least 5 years out of them especially since these discs are specifically made to be run 24/7 in a NAS.