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

WD40EFRX HDDs run very cool because they spin at 5400 RPM and have only 3 platters inside. They are CMR/conventional magnetic recording HDDs and NOT SMR/shingled magnetic recording HDDs. Most folks should avoid SMR HDDs like the plague because of the odd read before write cycle that SMR drives employ. If you need a 4 TB HDD the WD40EFRX is the perfect HDD as far as Im concerned because it is reliable and runs cool. Now, I dont need a 72000 RPM drive because I boot from an SSD. My 4 TB HDDs are strictly for long term storage. Heres some technical info about WD40EFRX HDDS from the HDD Platter Database: - ?early? WD40EFRX HDDs that have model #s like WD40EFRX-**WT0N* have 4 platters - modern WD40EFRX HDDs that have model #s like WD40EFRX-**N32N* have 3 platters When a drive spins fewer platters it generates less heat, thus less heat in your case.

Excellent Drives. Ive been running a variety of WD Red, Green, and Seagate Archive Drives for the better part of several years, and I thought that I would share some useful advice for things to watch out for when buying new drives, and detecting infant mortality. First thing to look for is to observe the packaging the drive arrives in. It is industry practice to ship one or more drives in boxes that are made to perfectly fit the drive. Inside the box, the drive should be suspended with two plastic holders. These holders suspend the drive and dampen any drops the package may experience during transit. (Bulk orders (15+) may be shipped in a single larger box with foam cut-out arrays). Secondly, when installing the drives, make sure that your hands are clean. Give them a wash, or better yet, wear gloves. Avoid transferring finger/hand oil to the drives so that hot-spots arent created. Thirdly, once the drives are installed, give them a full, long format. You can run 1, 3, 5, (or even more) passes on the disks. This ensures that every single sector of the drives gets written to. Once the format is complete, look up the SMART data, and check the values for anything alarming. If a drive suffered damage in shipping, now is when it may be noticeable. Compare the values to your other drives. Start-up times, head parks and so fourth may vary slightly so theres nothing to be worried about a little deviation there, but pay attention to failed reads, reallocated sectors, and RUEs. Granted, all of this advice should be taken with a grain of salt since SMART values are not the silver bullet to predict drive failure, but this testing should be a good indicator on whether or not a drive is ready for production use. Above all else, remember that backups are your friend.

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.

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 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.

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.

Drives dont fail a lot but some due. I was the lucky one to get a drive with an IO device error. I had to wait 1 month for my replacement drive (I selected standard). To my astonishment, I received an used drive.........with IO device error (impossible to format, clean, initialize). This is when I found out that WD ALWAYS RETURNS REFURBISHED DRIVES FOR RMA. Not the ideal business model in my humble opinion, as they use the drives from other RMA returns. WD claims that the drives go through extensive testing, but so did the defective drive they send me after my RMA claim. Now I escalated the issue to WD management and insisted they send me a new drive (they offered a higher capacity refurbished model, no thx). WD mgt approved this and to my great surprise received a disk with marks on the front plate, again a used drive. The disk passed all test I could possibly run on it, but writing speeds were in KB/s range (yes I did check on different slots on my server and different computers for SATA connection issues). The likeliness that you will get an inferior product is high, logically as they use recovered RMA drives. This is such a bad business policy, trying to save a couple of $$ on dissatisfied customers. I still cant wrap my mind around it. I was not going to go through this again or gamble on a 4rth drive being perfect. Raised the issue to Amazon and they refunded the money. Customer Obsession works at Amazon for sure not WD. I honestly think the issue is that terrible service center in Calexico. They never kept my RMA statuses updated, I had to insist several times on updates, they test the drives poorly (which I think is a fair claim) and I assume poorly executed the instructions on sending a new drive and took what they had on stock for my case. Once you have to deal with them, you are in a BAD position! SHOULD YOU CLAIM A RMA TRY TO GET YOUR MONEY BACK AND NOT A REPLACEMENT DRIVE SO YOU CAN BUY A NEW DRIVE. IF THAT DOENST WORK INSIST ON A NEW DRIVE. IF THAT DOESNT WORK CONTACT AMAZON AND GET A REFUND. ------------------------ WD SUPPORT STATEMENT WD’s replacement Product under its limited warranty will be manufactured from new and serviceable USED parts. PS why 2 stars? I wanted to give a higher rating, as I also own a 30EFRX and a 60EFAX which run like a dream. The 30FRX is very reliable disk check backblaze. But 3x a faulty drive? One star would not be fair.

All hard drives eventually burn out, and that will be a big deciding factor on how good this one was when it happens. For now, its all about the capacity and speed, which are good. I have a large array of hard drives that I use as multiple backups for my file system, which includes a lot of RAW and Photoshop photography files and video footage that I shoot. Whenever a hard drive fails, I replace it, recopy the backup it held, and move on. Whenever that happens, I also upgrade to larger drives available at the time to expand my library size. At this point, I should state clearly that Ive always been a Seagate buyer, but have some WDs in my system because they came with the last couple of machines that I didnt build from scratch, and they seem to work just fine. So, this WD drive looked like a pretty good deal, and I decided to go ahead and buy it. This has a nice large capacity, and has proven to be plenty fast for storage and Photoshop work, and also for working with my video files while editing and so forth, so Im happy with that. What I wasnt very happy with is that it wasnt inherently recognized by my computer for the full 4TB, but only 2TB. I contacted WDD about it, and after going over the very high specs of my computer and trying a few fixes, a tech had me wipe the drive using the write all zeros method, which took several hours, and re-try. That didnt work. Another session with tech support, and they determined that I needed to box it up and send it to them for replacement. I was all set to do that, when I decided to try one more thing before sending it to WD: I downloaded the latest Seagate SeaTools for Windows to see if it could help me resolve the problem. Within a few minutes, it was all resolved and I was all set with the full 4TB. The fact that I had to go to a different hard drive manufacturer and get their software tool to resolve this problem puts a bad taste in my mouth toward WD, specifically toward their customer service / tech support. In short, they got it wrong twice, had no tool of their own for me to download to solve it, wanted me to box it up and send it to them for replacement, which would probably have just put me right back where I started when the new drive arrived, and didnt volunteer that I try their competitors SeaTools software to fix the problem. Im thinking from here on out, Ill just go back to buying Seagate for my hard drive replacements.

This review is for Western Digital Red 4TB WD40EFRX (64mb cache) and not the newer version WD40EFAX (256mb cache). At the time of purchase, the newer version is the same price as this version but I chose this version as I suspect that the newer version is built with SMR, which would take heavy penalty eventually as my usage involves frequent writing and rewriting of data. For more info, google: 1. “PMR vs SMR” 2. “Western Digital admits 2TB-6TB WD Red NAS drives use shingled magnetic recording” I have purchased two of these for Synology DS218+ NAS and so far they are performing well in Synology Hybrid RAID configuration. Both drives clear the initial S.M.A.R.T. extended test. In terms of write speed, they consistently get 100MB/s to 120MB/s over my gigabit network. They are quiet and the temperature is never in the alarming range. According to the label, these are made in Thailand and they were only a month old from the date of purchase. I had a few Western Digital Green drives that have lasted for over eight years and counting. I hope these Reds will last the same. Since I have these for only a short while, I have yet completely fill up the drive or have the need for a RAID rebuild so I cannot attest their durability or if they are in fact PMR. I will update this review upon the one year mark.

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 -