Western Digital 16TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5 - WD161KFGX

These drives make a constant ticking noise once every 5 seconds. This seems to be a feature of the drive, as they continuously proactively scan the media for bad sectors and relocate them before they become unreadable. This in itself is a good thing. What is bad is excessively audible noise this creates. Sitting anywhere close to these hard drives, the periodic clockwork nature of these clicks, every 5 seconds from each drive, it becomes very annoying real fast. I expected 7200 rpm drives to be have more white noise than 5400 rpm drives. Thats fine. A bit louder random head movements while drive is being accessed, I can get used to that. However, I did not expect these to click like a very loud antique clock all day long even when completely idle. If you are buying hard drives for a datacenter, these are probably great. If you are buying them for a NAS box that youll keep far away from sight (and ears) in a separate room in a basement, these should do just fine. If theyll be anywhere near you while you work, constant ticking clock-like noise from these will start driving you nuts real fast.

Using 2, 4TB drives in a home RAID array for photos, videos, etc. Main drive is an SSD but decided to go with these for bulk storage as they are a bit cheaper (guessing my last time buying HDDs and next time will just use SSDs because they are just so much faster). Drives seems to perform nicely and other than a little HDD noise here and there dont find them bothersome at all. Previously had 2, 2TB of these red drives in a RAID array (had it running for about 8 years) and never had any issues. In our office we have Gold versions of these running on a backup server for about 6 years with no issues. All in all, very reliable. Speed is fine, but obviously not going to compare to SSD. One thing about size of the drives which I see some comments on... The size of the 4TB drive is going to be approximately 4 trillion bytes (mine is 4,000,765,177,856 bytes), however your system will likely report that as 3.64 TB or 3.726 GB. The reason for this is that Windows computes 1GB as equal to 1,073,741,824 bytes and 1TB as equal to 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. These numbers are achieved by raising 2 to an increasingly greater power till you get your first number in the billions and then trillions. There is some technical reason why this is done, but ultimately it is just confusing as it creates 2 different ways of computing size. One, counting the actual number of bytes and the other, dividing your bytes by one of those numbers to get the amount of GBs or TBs. For MB the number Windows uses is 1,048,576 bytes (for example a 20,000,0000 byte file will be reported as 20,000,000 / 1,048,576 = 19.07MB). In any case, here is a summary of the approx drives sizes and around what Windows will report the size as (assuming the drives sizes represent actual bytes exactly, so 4TB for this calculation will be 4,000,000,000 bytes and not the number my computer showed above... so expect the actual numbers to be slightly higher than these): 2TB Drive = 1.82TB or 1,862.65GB 4TB Drive = 3.64TB or 3,725.29GB 6TB Drive = 5.46TB or 5,587.94GB 8TB Drive = 7.28TB or 7,450.58GB 10TB Drive = 9.09TB or 9,313.23GB 20TB Drive = 18.19TB or 18,626.45GB Hope this clears up some confusion here.

you can count on them in your NAS.

This 14 TB drive is 12.7 TB formatted in Windows. These drives are great. I also have a 8 TB (7.27 TB in Windows) version that is still going strong after 2.5 years running 24/7.

I have 5 of these in my Drobo5N and none have failed over there years. Originally I had 5 3tb green WD drives. The difference is that my new 6TB WD Red rotates and 7200 RPM instead of the old green drives rotating at 5400 rpm. There is a down side to the red drives. They use more power so now I can hear the 60 hum. I set the NAS so it will spin down the drives when not in use. Also, do not mix 5400 and 7200 rpm drives unless you like to hear a vibration caused by the difference in the frequencies of the drives. Other than the extra noise mixing drives with different rpms is OK. Now that are the drives are 7200 rpm, the NAS is a little bit quieter with only 60 Hz hum.

I already said they are the best....what more do you need?

Been running fine for two years now. After trying two 16 TB Seagate drives that arrived DOA, I decided to try these NAS drives. It looks like the Seagate drives are just too fragile to survive shipping. The new WD Red Pro fired right up and has been writing continuously for 3 hours now. Update: Still working fine after a year. Loses one star for being noisy as hell. It sounds like demons are trying to bash their way out when its busy.

I purchased the 4T version for home PC with a windows operating system. I need this particular HDD because it is listed 7200RPM. I didnt meet any challenge when I installed other WD hard drives. It involved only a few clicks when I switched from WD 1T to 2T months ago, for example. I simply inserted the new disk into a USB case and cloned the entire disk in Minitool participation and got the job done. I was not lucky with this disk. It gave me so much trouble and wasted my two days to figure this out. First, sector size was different from my old 2t WD Blue drive thus I couldnt clone it directly. Because the target drive was not the main OS drive so I decided to simply copy all the folders into the new HDD and switch the two. Then I used Minitool to format it. It refused the command, software reported error. I then tried all other software including the one recommended on WD website (Acronis True Image for Western Digital). I finally got it done by using EaseUS. I formatted it and copied all folders from the old disk and switched it with the old internal disk. When I opened windows, none of the partitions created in EaseUS showed up. HDD showed up in BIOS menu so I knew it was there. I googled answer to this problem, read all articles to educate myself. Checked Manage disk in OS and realized one of the partitions was listed as GPT protective partition. I then followed the article published on Seagate website (ironic) and cleaned the entire disk using diskpat command. All data were removed. I returned to day 1. If your partition software doesnt work in Windows, check whether this disk is GPT protective in disk management. Dont repeat my mistake. I am glad I didnt do anything harmful to the old drive thus I spent the second day repeating what I did before, copy and paste. Now the new drive works and it works faster than old WD blue 2T. It is quite noisy but not scary. I am satisfied with the product so far but I hope WD can improve the product to meet various needs from customers. I am not a tech guy but switching HDD shouldnt be so difficult and time-consuming, thus I removed one star (should have been two stars when I felt frustrated yesterday).

I installed these drives into a Dell PowerEdge R210 II and they are working flawlessly so far. Its been a week. They are running in an Unraid server. I was thinking that they may need jumpers set to support 3Gbps SATA settings, but they worked magically out of the box.

My older hard drive and external enclosure failed (it was time for sure). This was a solid replacement to use for Time Machine backup. I partitioned into two for additional file storage for movies. Plus you can hardly hear this drive spinning.