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 purchased 2 of these drives as a replacement for two standard WD Red drives for my new Synology ds220+ NAS. The NAS could not be found on the wired network. Did some research and they do not always play well with Synology. Replaced with the plus drives and setup was quick and easy. They are silent when not being written to and with small transfers of data (few Mb) They emit a sound when transferring large amounts of data >2-3 Gbs. It was easy to install in Synology but that is a Synology review. Currently have almost 50% of the drive used with parity drive so if one fails, I can just swap it out and rebuild the drive without loss of data.

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.

Review for: WD Red 2 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD20EFRX I have 4 of these in my ReadyNAS NV+. They replaced four 1.5TB drives that had filled up and also periodically require a boot scan that would take hours to complete. These WD Drives have yet to need a boot scan. Transfer speeds with the new drives across my network did drop by about 20% from the old 7200 RPM drives. There a many complaints about new hard drives being DOA. Mechanical abuse is always a concern but drives can survive hard knocks surprisingly well when theyre not running. A more likely reason for DOA is user failure to treat these static sensitive devices with at least minimal electro-static discharge (ESD) avoidance procedures. Touching an earth ground before opening that silvery bag can make the difference between a functioning drive and a door stop. Avoid touching the drives circuit board and connector contacts. During winter heating season, the human body can easily acquire a 10,000 volt or greater charge just walking around the room. Do you sometimes get shocked touching a doorknob? Ideally, wear a simple grounding wrist strap connected to a known good earth ground before handling any ESD sensitive electronic component. One can be purchased here for less than $2: http://www.amazon.com/Static-Wrist-Strap-Discharge-Grounding/dp/B00530GDHG/ref=sr_1_4?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1395771639&sr=1-4&keywords=grounding+strap 6/4/2017 Update: One the the 4 drives failed after 3 years and was replaced with the same model. The 3 original drives and the replacement continue to operate nominally in the ReadyNAS NV+. 3/7/2019 Update: all drives continue to run nominally.

Ive read a lot about these drives and how reliable they are, so I decided to try them for a change from normal/regular WD drives. I am used to WD green drives, which I use 24x7 (2x 500GB and 2x 2TB in RAID0) since 2010 without a single glitch (read/write some 10GB/day on average), the green drives are fantastic, and my SMART sensors still show very healthy indicators! I bought 4x3TB WD Red NAS to configure a RAID10 array, i need it for my massive music production samples collection (Kontakt 5 :-) ), sequential reading speed is crucial, so is redundancy, RAID10 is the key! Drives arrived a couple of days later than promised, its ok, things happen. I prepared everything right, done the backups, managed my ATX tower internal cables and controller ports to accomodate the 4 extra drives. plugged the drives, powered the system, and POOOOFFFFF, one of the drives is a Dead On Arrival!!!!! it just clicks and clicks and keep on clicking!!!! what a disaster! I mean to me its 4 brand new drives with one failing already, so 25% defect rate!!!! I contacted Amazon, they were very kind offered a replacement that arrives within 2 weeks as i live abroad, more wasted time, and i have to ship on my expense the defective product! too bad! I will wait for the replacement drive and update my review accordingly, i give 1 star due to already proven product reliability and RMA policy. Update: I should mention that Amazon customer were very kind and offered to me full refund for shipping the defective product back to the USA. The replacement drive arrived right on time, working great, I am increasing my rating from 1 star to 3 stars due to Amazon and WD great customer support. drives are in use since 6 months, all looks goods, cool drives, low temperature (27-35 Celsius) in the ventilated RAID cage. RAID10 on software IntelP55 SATA2 (3.0GT/s) using windows 10 x64: Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 253.285 MB/s Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 91.257 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 15.873 MB/s [ 3875.2 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2.962 MB/s [ 723.1 IOPS] Sequential Read (T= 1) : 135.242 MB/s Sequential Write (T= 1) : 59.555 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 2.449 MB/s [ 597.9 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.442 MB/s [ 107.9 IOPS] Test : 100 MiB [E: 50.9% (1804.0/3540.9 GiB)] (x3) [Interval=5 sec]

I purchased this from Amazon Warehouse in Used-Acceptable condition. Running an initial S.M.A.R.T. test revealed 0 Bad Sectors, however, the drive did have a drive reconnection count of 13. While 13 for this metric is not good, I monitor it weekly, and no new drive reconnects have occurred. As the drive had a relatively low 400 hrs when I received it, I was ok keeping the drive, given the 30% discount from full price. I recommend buying WD Red drives from Amazon Warehouse when the discounts are warrant it. I think these are a great value. Make sure to research the spin RPMs and whether the drive is CMR or SMR. Many of the WD Red drives may be advertised as 5400 RPM Class, but they actually run at 7200 RPM. Lastly, avoid any SMR drives altogether.

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.

Great drives. Ive got 4x 4TB Reds in a custom server i made that has been running for 2+ years pretty much 24/7. Had to replace a failing Seagate drive (my fault using a standard Desktop HDD in a build like this) and these just work, and well. Build: CPU: ................Intel Core i5-4430 3.0GHz Quad-Core Processor Motherboard.......ASRock Z87E-ITX Mini ITX LGA1150 Motherboard Memory.............Kingston Blu 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory Storage.............Crucial M500 120GB mSATA Solid State Disk Storage.............4x Western Digital Red 4TB 3.5 5900RPM Internal Hard Drive Case.................Fractal Design Node 304 Mini ITX Tower Case Power Supply.....Rosewill Capstone 450W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply Running Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials and Pooled using Stablebit Drive Pool. I use it to serve up movies and TV shows via Plex, backup my other computers, and as a storage server. These Red drives work well as they are built for NAS usage and so they work well in situations where they are spun down frequently. I have considered the Seagate NAS drives too as they are sometimes cheaper but Ive had some issues with Seagate drives in the past (still use a 3TB one in my main desktop) and I have never in 20+ years had an issue with a WD drive. Others mileage may vary. For now and my needs 4x these are plenty of space with room to grow. Would be nice if they came out with 8+TB versions sometime soon though at an affordable price point. Seagate has had a 8TB drive out for a while and its generally cheaper than the 6TB Red, however im not sure how reliable the 8TB Seagate drive is.

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.

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.

The short summary: these work great for bulk file storage in the home--built to be continually powered up and to store large amounts of data for the home user, power user, or small business. Ive got a love-hate relationship with WD: their USB drives have been problematic and disappointing, but the Caviar Black internal drives have run very well for RAID 0 / RAID 5 gaming in my desktop PCs. I bought these Red volumes to fill in the slots in a home server that had a RAID 1 array where a member had died...it turned out to be cheaper to buy three 4TB volumes, start over, and gain a ton more space than to try to dig up an exact match for the bad drive and still keep a smaller array. This time around, I used Windows Storage Spaces, a feature in Windows 8 and above. On Windows 10 64-bit I was able to set up a large storage space with Parity and use it for my system backups. Western Digital have done a good job making it easier to understand all these drives, and if you stop by their site, youll see what the color codes mean (like Green for everyday desktop, Purple for surveillance systems). If youre big on the details with hard drives, you know that the way theyre built makes some better for gaming, some for large files, some for continuous writes, etc. The Red series is for storage: the kind you stick in a file server and expect them to be running 24/7 or for long periods of time, and youre not needing super-fast response time. Theyve been running continuously since I installed them and a periodic temperature check doesnt seem to indicate theyre overheating and getting stressed. So far Ive been happy with the ease of use of the WD Red 4TB NAS desktop hard drives. They were fairly cheap, they do the job, and I suspect theyll last me for quite a while in my home server.