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

Over the years Ive purchased several WD red drives for my Synology home NAS. I started with the 4TB, then moved up to 6TB and finally 8TB. I havent had a chance to try the 10TBs yet, since the price is still up there unless you REALLY need the space (time of writing is mid-2018). But Im sure Ill get there eventually. Prior to the reds being available, I purchased many of the WD green drives (at least 7 at last count). Unfortunately, the greens were not designed for NAS use, so you had to find a Linux system to plug the drive into to change a firmware setting to disable a 300 second idle timeout... the drives idling repeatedly in a 24-hour environment after many months of use would eventually add additional wear and tear on the greens that would reduce their overall lifespan significantly. The reds were definitely a nice addition to the WD lineup, as they were the first budget drive from WD that were specifically designed for (home) NAS use... no firmware tweaks necessary. OK, enough of the history lesson. I would rate the WD green drives as being very reliable, but not perfect. I believe I received one that was DOA, which was an easy process with Amazon to ship back and replace. During many years of operation (my first green was purchased in 2009 and is still going strong today after continuous use for almost 9 years), I only had 1 drive that failed in my NAS. It disconnected from the array, which immediately degraded the RAID. The drive that failed was not the oldest drive that I owned, so I ran the SMART tests and everything came back A-OK. I let the Synology rebuild the RAID array with the failed drive, and everything seemed to be working for a couple of months... until it disconnected again. This was a good indication that it was time to replace the drive, which I did. OK, so Ive had a pretty good history with WD drives. Getting back to the reds, I own at least 6 of them in various capacities. First, let me say that none have ever failed outright or caused any data loss in my system, so overall their track record is great. However, both of the 6TB reds that Ive purchased have had multiple disk re-identification events in my NAS. These re-identification events have not caused any data loss, nor do they require a rebuild of the RAID array. Synology says that re-identification events are an early warning sign that the drive could fail, so to keep an eye on these events to see if theyre increasing in frequency... if so its probably time to replace the drive(s) to avoid any potential data loss. On both of my 6TB reds, Im averaging about 1 disk re-identification event every 12 to 18 months, so Im not overly concerned. Ive never seen any strange events (re-identification, re-connection, bad sectors, etc.) on any of the 4TB or 8TB reds that I own, so this problem seems to be specific to the 6TB model (or its a huge coincidence). My 6TB reds were purchased in 2014 and 2015, so its possible that whatever was causing the issue was corrected. I have the 6TB reds loaded into a backup NAS, but I will personally not be purchasing any more of them. YMMV. Overall Im giving these drives 4 stars. If possible, Id give 3 stars to the 6TB reds (simply due to the anxiety factor), and 5 stars to the other reds (well, at least the 4TB and 8TB, which Ive had personal experience with), but Amazon does not allow for split review ratings.

May 2014 - I forgot to update this, so Im doing it almost a year later. Down graded to one star. TLDR - Amazon was great, however, 4 drives (two sets of two) failed in 24 hours. Extensive conversations with WD second level support resulting in them saying return the drives, so I bought 3TB green drives again for the external enclosures, and 3TB Toshiba/Hitachi drives for the NAS. Very unimpressed with WD RED drives - all marketing on what are really just average drives. This is to justify continued higher costs after the flood farce perpetrated on the public. Yes, the flood happened, however, the raping of the customers has continued (easily researched what theyve done, and prices dont lie). Lets hope SSDs come down in price soon.... ****** Original review ****** Im leaving a generous, but temporary, 2-star review. My two drives failed within 24 hours and Im awaiting replacement drives so Ill update this review after Ive tested them. First, I want to state that Amazons shipping was flawless and I dont think it was a problem for these drives. I currently own at least 25 WD drives (as well as many by other vendors) and ordered 2x 3TB Red drives for use first in external enclosures, and later to be put in a Synology NAS. They never made it past the enclosure stage, and were dead in a day. All work, no play, for me at least. 1) Drives were placed in USB 3.0 external enclosures, initialized as GPT under Win7 (x64), and a NTFS Quick format was performed. I then ran a SMART Quick Test using WDs Data Lifeguard (DLG), which passed fine. Note: DLG quick test only checks the first and last million sectors, leaving most of the drive unchecked. The drives were each loaded with approx 1.5TB of data, and then shutdown properly using Safely remove hardware before disconnecting. Note: the 1-year-old enclosures support 3TB drives - verified with the mfg again this morning - and were previously housing WD and Hitachi 2TB drives without issue. 2) Attempted to start the drives the next day, but they werent identified by Explorer, and when finally found in Disk Management (under Admin -> Computer Management) they were once again showed as Not initialized. They were in effect, dead to me. 3) I attempted to mount the drives on another, almost new, high-end computer running Win8 Pro. The drives were not seen by Explorer, but could be found under Disk Management, however, they showed with 2TB labeled MBR protected and 7xxGB unallocated. No data could be read. 4) Contacted WD support. After discussing all events and options, their recommendation was sendem back to us or Amazon, theyre dead. 5) I accepted that something had gone wrong, but again using DLG, I tried a low level process called Write Zeros. The first drive simply failed with bad sectors after running for 5 hours. I tried to continue the process by clicking the pop-up error window 50-100x times before finally giving up. I couldnt format it, couldnt write zeros, nothing worked. After several more attempts, I finally got it to finish a windows format (ran for the last 12 hours), but I dont trust it. The second drive did allow me to Write Zeros, but I dont trust it either. Theyre both going back. Write Zeros may temporarily fix drives, but may also just mask the underlying problem(s). (And yes, I understand erasing vs. formatting, the data implications, etc.). WD has a problem, and because of that so do we. I recommend everyone format and test these drives before use. I know drives fail; Ive had many drive failures in the last couple of years (3 Seagate, 5 Samsung F4s, etc.) but all before they were mounted in a NAS. Read the reviews, understand that its a lottery, and though I had hoped for more, I didnt win the first time. You may get lucky.... or.... you may not. Ill update this review after receiving my new drives, and have tested them in brand new enclosures.

Quiet and easy to install, and stores as much as is rated. So whats not to like? Well, these things are no good if it fails! I have had these Red Plus HDDs to fail, either by overheating or by something wrong with its on-board circuitry, within a year or two of installation. Thats unacceptable even in a RAID 5 or 6 configuration - and if this had been in a JBOD configuration, who knows what I might have lost? I got this only because I thought I needed it to put into a Western Digital MyCloud Pro NAS server. The Walled Garden paradigm is obsolete. WD seems to know a good (or at least passable) deal about server hardware and software - but not enough about the disks that go into it. If you want disks that will NOT fail, go for Seagate instead.

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.

Cant go wrong with these drives if you have a home/small business NAS (1-8 drives). Purchased two 2-TB RED drives as used - very good from Amazon Warehouse Deals. These drives are specifically designed to function in NAS devices. Drives are to be installed in a QNAP TS-231 2-drive NAS - FYI please check the compatibility of your NAS device BEFORE you purchase drives for it. Most manufacturers have a list on their websites highly recommended to verif;y unless you buy a NAS with drives already installed. would leave five stars but not done with testing, even though I expect them to be great. Will revise once they are spinning for a while longer. WD sells RED drives in the following configurations: Model # Interface Form Factor Capacity Cache WD60EFRX SATA 6 Gb/s 3.5 Inch IntelliPower 6 TB 64 MB WD50EFRX SATA 6 Gb/s 3.5 Inch IntelliPower 5 TB 64 MB *WD40EFRX SATA 6 Gb/s 3.5 Inch IntelliPower 4 TB 64 MB *WD30EFRX SATA 6 Gb/s 3.5 Inch IntelliPower 3 TB 64 MB *WD20EFRX SATA 6 Gb/s 3.5 Inch IntelliPower 2 TB 64 MB *WD10EFRX SATA 6 Gb/s 3.5 Inch IntelliPower 1 TB 64 MB *WD10JFCX SATA 6 Gb/s 2.5 Inch IntelliPower 1 TB 16 MB *WD7500BFCX SATA 6 Gb/s 2.5 Inch IntelliPower 750 GB 16 MB •* Retailers may have existing product inventory of WD Red with NASware 2.0 for the specific capacities ranging from 1 TB – 4 TB. Please check with your retailer prior to purchasing for current inventory and product availability of WD Red with NASware 3.0 10-15- Update: Drives installed and running for about a week now. One drive was still in sealed bag and was new - the second one was run about 140 hours. All other S.M.A.R.T. data was perfect. Im not an advocate of used drives, but in this case, it seems to have worked out. Final note: WD makes a PRO version of this drive with a 5-year warranty, compared to three for this model.

I run a project studio that deals with a LOT of media. From recording bands to full HD video editing, I need a lot of reliable storage. I started out with an EX4 Western Digital NAS unit that was loaded with 4 Western Digital Red drives. 4 drives at 4TB each for a total of 16TB of storage. After a year, I upgraded the Ex4 to a PR4100 unit as it was WAY faster then the EX4. I ended up moving the 4 drives from the Ex4 to the PR4100 and continued with them for another year; and they where in the NAS unit running 24/7 without any sleep mode activated on the drives. They where awake, on, and running 24/7. I just recently purchased 4 of these WD Red drives at 8TB each for a total of 32TB. I again, run the drives 24/7 in my NAS unit without any sleep modes enabled. There is no spin up/spin down time. I can not state how solid WD Red drives are. I have been using them for almost 3 years now. Theyre reliable, solid in speed when used in the right RAID configuration inside the proper NAS environments , and they are overall quiet (unless of course you are running a format on them for a new RAID setup, then they all get hammered on at the same time and make some noise). When I upgraded to the 4 new drives with 8TB on them, I took the older 4 drives with 4TB on them, and started using them in desktop PC as basic extra storage drives. No issues with any of them. They are still running solid after 3 years of use. All the drives run 24/7. I have never had a Western Digital drive die on me unexpectedly. Most of them run 3 to 4 years and I usually only replace them because I need bigger capacity drives, not because they die or fail. I highly recommended WD drives, and these red drives are fantastic!

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.

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!

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.

Just bought 2 drives advertised as Used: Like New | Details Sold by TechnoDealsUSA These drive pass all the S.M.A.R.T test but they have both be run for 48,000+ hours virtually non stop. That is over 5.5 years. I would not exactly call them Like New. I only saved about 20% buying used over new. I hope I dont regret this.