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

These are great NAS drives. Im currently running 10 Reds and similar number of Blacks in my home setup. For me these drives have been reliable, and run cool and quiet. The Reds are a slower drive, but work perfectly for my longer term storage - especially if in a RAID or cached environment. With over 30 years dealing with computers, Ive had the pleasure (and sometimes pain) of dealing with a huge variety of storage media. There are some companies I just will not no near again, but Western Digital drives are my go-to. All drives fail - this is a fact. But in all my time using WD, the failures Ive had have been graceful, throwing up errors telegraphing the issue, and allowing extraction of data and the ability to plan for replacement. Backups and redundancy are a must obviously, but I have not experienced an immediate catastrophic failure like I have with other brands - YMMV. Ive used WDs RMA process, but not for several years. I do remember it being extremely painless though. I remember submitting my request for RMA, and being provided a UPS label, and actually given the option of providing a credit card as collateral and having them ship a replacement drive that day instead of having to wait for them to receive the faulty drive before shipment. Overall, I continue to have a great experience with Western Digital drives, and would suggest the Red as an option for any home NAS environment.

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 -

Its a very good hard drive for NAS, just as described. so far it has worked great. I have only noticed that over time the noise level has increased when uploading to the NAS.

almost 3 years later(((2y, 5m, 15d, 11h))) its still doing ok using in a unraid box smart status 1 Raw read error rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always Never 0 3 Spin up time 0x0027 180 174 021 Pre-fail Always Never 4000 4 Start stop count 0x0032 097 097 000 Old age Always Never 3105 5 Reallocated sector count 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always Never 0 7 Seek error rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 0 9 Power on hours 0x0032 071 071 000 Old age Always Never 21587 (2y, 5m, 15d, 11h) 10 Spin retry count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old age Always Never 0 11 Calibration retry count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old age Always Never 0 12 Power cycle count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old age Always Never 26 192 Power-off retract count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 22 193 Load cycle count 0x0032 199 199 000 Old age Always Never 3082 194 Temperature celsius 0x0022 118 109 000 Old age Always Never 29 196 Reallocated event count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 0 197 Current pending sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 0 198 Offline uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old age Offline Never 0 199 UDMA CRC error count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 0 200 Multi zone error rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old age Offline Never 0

If youre looking at this review, youre probably in the market for some honkin big drives to stuff into a server or a NAS box. These Western Digital Red series drives are probably a total waste of money if youre planning to put them into a regular PC. If youre not doing a raid array of some kind, then save your money and buy the green or black series drives instead. If youre looking to set up a raid array of some sort, these are a bargain. They arent the fastest drives, but they are rated to run 24x7 serving up data! Their 3 year warranty is above the current industry standard for consumer hard drives. For my home-made FreeNAS (google it!) NAS/Server, I bought 5 WD Red drives from Adorama (purchased through Amazon) and 1 drive directly from Amazon. The one drive from Amazon came very well packaged, double boxed in what looks like a WD cardboard box with a shock absorbing cradle. Very well packaged for shipment. Honestly, Amazon has been stellar for packaging boxes for shipment. The 5 hard drives from Adorama came in a big box which clunked when it was tilted. Opening the box revealed some big plastic pillow air strips, and 5 loose smaller boxes. Inside each of the smaller boxes was a few pillows and a factory bagged hard drive. There were not enough pillows in each box to securely cushion the hard drives against rattling around, so theres a high likelihood of damage in shipment. BAD SHIPPERS! NO DONUT! Anyway, getting on to the performance of the drives... Im running 6 drives in a ZFS RaidZ2 array. They are all controlled using an IBM M1015 PCIE 8x SATA 3 controller which has been flashed to be an HBA providing JBOD to the ZFS OS. Thats a lotta acronyms! The speed of the array is quite fast... more than fast enough to saturate a gigabit network. I currently have about 5TB of data stored on the 10TB array. On to the bad stuff... One of the drives (I havent checked the serial number to see which shipper it came from) is starting to give signs of premature failure after about 70 hours of operation. During a scrub of the data pool, drive DA5 is experiencing unreadable sectors. Luckily ZFS is able to calculate the correct values for the corrupted data, and is busily recreating the data onto another part of the drive. ZFS rocks for data reliability! If the drive does turn out to be bad, I have a WD Green 3TB drive that I can put into the array as a hot swap temporarily until the failed drive can be replaced. *UPDATE* The ZFS scrub just finished, and it repaired 1.53MB of data, with no data loss. Did I mention that ZFS rocks? Warning/Advice about Data Storage: Note 1: If youre going to be using these drives, or any data storage device for that matter, make sure that you take into account that these are highly fragile and delicate devices which can be easily damaged in shipment, or just plain up and fail when you least expect it. You really need to use some sort of redundant array of drives so that if one drive fails, your data doesnt vanish. In my case, the final configuration is going to be 6 drives in a RaidZ2 (dual parity striping), which means that my data stays intact and accessible even if 2 drives fail simultaneously. Also, there is going to be a 3TB Green drive as a hot spare that can take over for any failed drive in the array. With the hot-spare, my data can survive the loss of 3 drives without losing data (as long as the failures dont happen all at the same time). Note 2: Always, always, always have a backup. In my case, I have two external 3TB USB3.0 drives which will be used only for backup purposes. Every so often, Ill backup the critical data onto the drives and stash them in my locker at work. If you dont have TrueCrypt, google it and see why your backup removable drives should be using it. If someone steals the drives, they only get the drives and not my data. Im giving 5 stars for the drives that work... 1 star for the failing drive... averages to about 4 stars score! Ill update this review once I have details on how the drives do in a week or so. Currently it aint looking too good for drive DA5!

I purchased two of the 3TB drives and one of the 2TB drives. When I went into WDIDLE3 the setting for all three drives were set to 300 seconds (5 minutes). Since I was in there I simply disabled it. These drives are working flawlessly thus far as I have the two 3TB drives in a media center running Media Browser 3, PlayOn, and a few other apps. The 2TB drive is hooked up to a Dish Network Hopper as a secondary storage. I have not experienced any issues so far with these drive. I will update as time goes on with more info. *Update 3/27/15: Some drive information obtained from HD Guardian: Drive 01 Serial Number: WD-WCC4N7E***** Firmware: 82.00A82 User Capacity: 3,000,592,982,016 bytes Product Name Status Exp Date (MM/DD/YYYY) 3 TB WD Red Hard Drive In Limited Warranty 1/6/2018 Overall Health: Temperature: 34*C High: 36*C Low: 34*C Last Test: Completed without error. No bad sector detected. No ATA error detected. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 185 182 021 Pre-fail Always - 5733 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 42 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 673 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 5 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 1 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 40 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 116 110 000 Old_age Always - 34 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 Working Time: 673 hours (28 days, 1 hours) Last Update Fri Mar 27 01:53:28 2015 CDT Drive 02 Serial Number: WD-WMC4N0F***** Firmware: 82.00A82 User Capacity: 3,000,592,982,016 bytes Product Name Status Exp Date (MM/DD/YYYY) 3 TB WD Red Hard Drive In Limited Warranty 12/11/2017 Overall Health: Temperature: 37*C High: 41*C Low: 35*C Last Test: N/A No bad sector detected. No ATA error detected. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 181 179 021 Pre-fail Always - 5950 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 50 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 672 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 4 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 1 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 48 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 113 109 000 Old_age Always - 37 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 Working Time: 672 hours (28 days) Last Update Fri Mar 27 01:53:28 2015 CDT ------------------------------------------- Update 5/14/2015 Some drive information obtained from HD Guardian: Drive 01 Serial Number: WD-WCC4N7E***** Firmware: 82.00A82 User Capacity: 3,000,592,982,016 bytes Product Name Status Exp Date (MM/DD/YYYY) 3 TB WD Red Hard Drive In Limited Warranty 1/6/2018 Overall Health: Temperature: 37*C High: 37*C Low: 34*C Last Test: Completed without error. No bad sector detected. No ATA error detected. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 186 182 021 Pre-fail Always - 5700 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 193 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 98 98 000 Old_age Always - 1844 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 5 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 1 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 190 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 113 108 000 Old_age Always - 37 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 Working Time: 1844 hours (2 months 16 days, 20 hours) Last Update Fri May 14 22:31:35 2015 CDT Drive 02 Serial Number: WD-WMC4N0F***** Firmware: 82.00A82 User Capacity: 3,000,592,982,016 bytes Product Name Status Exp Date (MM/DD/YYYY) 3 TB WD Red Hard Drive In Limited Warranty 12/11/2017 Overall Health: Temperature: 37*C High: 41*C Low: 35*C Last Test: N/A No bad sector detected. No ATA error detected. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 181 179 021 Pre-fail Always - 5908 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 242 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 98 98 000 Old_age Always - 1836 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 5 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 1 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 240 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 110 106 000 Old_age Always - 40 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 Working Time: 1836 hours (2 months, 16 days, 12 hours) Last Update Fri May 14 22:31:35 2015 CDT

I bought two of the 12TB drives to extend my Windows Storage pool. I just plugged them in and went to Disk Management and Initialized them. Then I added the drives to the storage pool and did some reconfiguring. The storage pool is now 29.1 TB and setup for two way mirroring. These drives have been on for 124 hours now and running well with a 33 degree C temperature. The server sits next to me and runs fairly quiet. These drives arent any louder than the 4TB drives they replaced. In fact those 4TB drives are up to 19000 power on hours and about 5 years service. They never showed signs of trouble but they storage pool was getting too small for my collection of movies, videos, music, and documents. So currently Im using the old drives for a non redundant offsite backup. I loaded the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on my server and I am using rsync to copy changes between my mirrored pool and the offsite drives. Anyway - I really like the WD red drives. Just be sure that if you get sizes less than 6TB for your NAS or storage space you want the Plus or the Pro series to make sure you get Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) versus the shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology. SMR was invented to pack more bits into a drive but it doesnt play well with NAS systems. Drives of 8TB to 14TB are all CMR so no worries on the higher capacity drives.

Generous capacity, generous pricing, solid construction, and no tricks or wool over the eyes. There is a reason I am a lifelong Western Digital fan and buy their products almost exclusively; They are serious about their products and sell them for fair market price. Ive purchased four of these in 8 TB storage size for usage in a Synology DS418 NAS server. Set up in a RAID configuration they are quite fast for reading, average for writing, noisy but not so unbearable I cant tolerate it (I have the server located within my bedroom that I sleep in.) These run hot because of their 24/7 operation and high RPMs. Ensure you have proper active cooling to avoid shortening the drive life. While they will run at room temperature with no cooling doing so will drastically cut down on the operational lifespan and void the warranty because of improper usage. Be sure to register yours with Western Digital on their website upon delivery to get the extended warranty that comes free by default with a purchase of any of their products. While I do not have exact statistics on their reading or writing speeds I was able to upload 1 GB worth of data in about 15 seconds and using my server they have no issue streaming raw 4K footage in real time read directly from disc.

I bought 3 of these in October 2013 to use in a home server setting. They are configured in a RAID-5 array, and they have been running 24/7 for more than 9 years straight without a glitch. Im impressed.

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.