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 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.

I replace my NAS drives every couple of years or so as it gets full, doubling the capacity each time. Prior to these 8TB drives I had a pair of 4TB WD reds, and before that a pair of 2TB WD greens and before that a pair of 1TB WD greens. These drives perform very well - on a par with the 4s I removed. But they make lots of strange noises, like intermittent soft buzzing, and occasional faint humming. They are noticeably noisier than the 4TB reds I replaced. But Ive been running them for almost 2 months without a hiccup. I have yet to lose a WD drive in this NAS over 7 years of 24x7 operation so I will stick with WD until that changes.

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 bought four of these drives a month ago and have been evaluating them since. I was so pleased with them that I bought a set of four for my self. Pros: * Excellent performance on large read and write workloads such as backing up large files. I plan to use these to as backup/archive servers where they will have 16 to 500G individual files copied to them nightly. As single drives or in RAID 0 or 10 sets, performance has been very, very impressive. * Power consumption is very low at approximately 4-5 watts each. If youre using these for a home NAS unit then four drives will use about the same power as some of my single older 7200 RPM drives. This appeals to me from an environmental responsibility perspective as well as keeping my utility bills from climbing. * Very quiet: I dont hear them at all. * Cool to the touch: Since they dont use much power and spin rather slowly, they dont generate much heat and can tolerate hot environments rather well. * They can be made very fast by short-stroking them: allocating only the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the disk for a RAID array and using that. Seek times drop in half and the high platter density provides some incredible performance numbers. * Price is very good for 3 TB of reliable storage. Cons: * They are not ideal for heavy workload, high simultaneous-transaction environments. Their average seek time is about double what Im seeing on some of my Hitachi 1TB drives which are much more aggressive for transaction processing workloads but cost $100 more for the same size, use more power and generate more heat and noise.

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.

I am an absolutely new user of this particular drive. I had five of the 3tB version in my Drobo 5N and, believe it or not, I was running out of protection space and the Drobo complained that the #1 drive should be replaced with something larger. I couldnt find a 5tB WD Red so I bought the 6tB and when the budget recovers Ill buy a second to actually gain a bit of actual storage space. For Drobo users, sticking one of these in the enclosure might be intimidating. 1) the hardware will be slow to recognize and initialize the drive so the indicator will stay red for some time -- be patient 2) even after the Drobo acknowledges the new drive it may be a few minutes before it starts the rebuild and 3) the most scary thing is the Drobos estimate of rebuild time; dashboard started out estimating 251 hours and then jumped to 299 hours(!) but then settled down to 20 hours after maybe 45 minutes of running and then quickly dropped to 17. Way more reasonable. (later) Well, after approximately 26 hours the data rebuild on the Drobo 5N completed with no complaints from the new 6tB WD Red drive. Of course this means that I will now need to buy a second equivalent drive to install because the Drobo, for its data protection scheme to work its magic, needs to have a #2 drive as large as the #1 to make use of the space. In other words, to gain 3tB of actual extra storage over what I had to begin with (5 X 3tB Red drives) I will need to expand to two 6tB drives along with three 3tB. Maybe I really should consider erasing some media files and keeping fewer hot backups... (later still) A month has gone by since I put the first of these 6tB drives into my Drobo 5N and my computer budget recovered enough to allow me to buy a second drive. With Drobos storage algorithms, adding the first drive didnt actually yield any increased storage but with the second addition I finally got an extra 3tB of storage. Again, the drive was thrashed pretty well in the 16+ hour data rebuilding process and everything went well. Im still impressed with WDs Red and Green drives with 10 or so of them in use the performance has been flawless. With two 6tB and three 3tB drives in the Drobo Im hoping that my server storage needs will be taken care of for a while. With all of these drives in the tiny Drobo 5N the operating temperature is good despite the small cooling fan and the fan noise is probably the loudest thing about the entire device.

Ive had my WD Red for going on 4 years now. No problems, no corrupted sectors, no additional noise. It goes every day and every year without any problems. Solid recommendation from me!

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.

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.

Earlier this year, I took a chance purchasing Seagates new 3TB HD for media storage and it died 2 months later. Since then Ive purchased a 3TB Western Digital RED drive (I would have picked the WD BLACK, but the price difference was a deal breaker). Its not in a NAS (just in PC), and with only one month in service I can say that at this point Im pleased with the drive and its performance. Its not as noisy, and certainly runs cooler than the dead Seagate, but time will tell. UPDATE: 10-14-12 I didnt wait for the six month period to bump it to 5-star status. I didnt mention it before but the dead Seagate was in a USB external housing which is what I put this in. I almost never hear it, and while I havent been as scientific as some (holding a stop watch, etc.)I have moved many large files to/from it, and then to two other external drives (same file each time) and the RED is by far the fastest, making things less time consuming. The others leave me toe-tapping or playing solitare until the transfers are complete. I bought a 2TB, not too long ago and plan to get 2 more 3TB drives before the end of the year. Yes, the RED series has a 3-year limited warranty. UPDATE: 11-17-12 The 3TB RED and my 3, 2TB REDs are still very happy campers, on a 24/7 basis. I recently built a PC for a customer and put the 1TB RED in it (about 3 weeks ago) and they are very happy with the build, and the first comment I received was Its so quiet. Our distributor tried to sway us from using these in anything other than a NAS, remarking that they were too slow, so I did some digging around various tech sites and came up with additional info: Due to its variable speed, Western Digital upped the MTBF from 650,000 hours to 1,000,000 3 year warranty with dedicated 24/7 support WD doesnt state the actual spin-speed, merely saying its Intellipower (meaning less than 7,200rpm), and from what Ive seen most put it in the 5400 to 5900 RPM range. The Drives cache memory was upgraded from DDR to DDR2 In a test pitting RED against other brand hard drives which run at 7200 RPM, it came out in the middle of the pack on random data tranfers, however, when transferring large media files (in the 20+ GB range) the RED beat the Seagate Barracuda by 2 minutes. UPDATE 12/31/12 No problems, runs cool, streams media great. The same goes for the 2- 2TB RED label drives in use. UPDATE 02/26/13 8 months of 24/7 and still going strong (3TB), 6 months of 24/7 and still going strong (2TB). So far, everyone Ive recommended these drives to (and bought them) are also Happy Campers. Update 06/28/2013 Nothing Good, Bad, or Ugly to add to my review. The system is up 24/7 in non-desirable conditions (76-80 degrees F, usually at 60%+humidity) and quality and reliability hasnt changed a bit! I cant recall but it has to be at least a year Ive been using the RED label.