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

First things first. This 2TB Red Pro drive is CMR (not SMR) technology, which is a relief. In any event, I installed these drives (2 of them) in my quite old, Synology DS211 NAS and thus far have had no issues at all. Pretty happy with them. I havent done any performance testing and this is just an occasional use device, largely for archival storage. I did upgrade to Synology DSM 6.2, no problems there either. All the drive features seem to work including sleep mode and S.M.A.R.T and other drive management technologies. Im mostly happy these drives were not SMR, that was my biggest concern. As far as noise, when these drives are spinning they are pretty darn quiet... literally cant hear them at less than 3 feet from my head. They do make some interesting noises when going into sleep/wake mode however.. very bizarre sounds. Vibration seems non-existent as well. I did have some older WD drives in this NAS for almost 8 years and they seemed to occasionally have some harmonics, these new Red Pro 2TB drives dont seem to have that issue at all. Good luck!

No hassles. Installs and worked. Just what you want with a hard drive.

If you own a WD NAS I strongly suggest you get the WD red pros not the Seagate IronWolf series due to potential formatting and pin voltage issues. Great hard drive and great reliability for the price if you live that long that is.

I bought two of WD Red PRO 18TB in October when they were on sale to replace the current disks in my Home Backup NAS. I bought 2 because I need two identical drives for the NAS. Disk 1 arrived a few days later and disk 2 arrived a few days later. And now the problems begun: Disk 2 which was sent to me wasnt an 18TB drive, it was only 6TB! A harmless mistake? Fraud? Who knows... Very annoying anyways... Now I tried to get disk 2 exchanged, but Amazon could only offer a refund, because the drives were out of stock with unknown restock date. Too bad because I didnt want a refund, since I got the drives for a good price and now they were more than 25% more expensive... So I had to wait about 3 weeks for the disk to be back in stock and be able to have it exchanged instead of just getting a refund. Today the exchanged drive finally arrived. This time it was as ordered 18TB. I installed both drives in my NAS. One drive was GOOD the other was recognized as BAD during the drive self test. The temperature reading was off and caused a S.M.A.R.T error. In fact there was no temperature reading at all for 1 drive. So I let the drive warm up for a few hours and tried it again. Same thing. SMART could no be read and there was no temperature shown for 1 of the 2 drives. I took both drives out of the NAS and tried to see whats going on by installing them in a Windows PC. One drive is fine. SMART is OK. No errors. The other drives just makes a weird repetitive noise and doesnt spin up. Its not recognized by windows. Its DOA (Dead On Arrival)! I checked which drive it was and it was the 2nd drive. The one I received as replacement today! So after the long wait and the whole odyssey of exchanging the drive the drive arrived DOA. Was it bad luck? Maybe. Do I trust these drives? No, not anymore. Never had a drive DOA. This was by far my worst experience buying Western Digital drives on Amazon! And I have quite a lot of them (in total probably about 16 different WD Elements and MyBooks). Since these 2 drives were supposed to be used in a NAS which should hold the backups of my personal and work PCs I thought Id buy the more expensive real WD Red Pro drives, which are designed for 24/7 operation, but what did I get? Just a way too long frustrating experience overall. Maybe I was just unlucky in this case, but I never had a problem with a shucked drive. So back to shucking external drives... I CANNOT recommend the WD Red Pro 18TB drives at this point. PS: the HDD came in the original Western Digital box which then was packed in one of the thin Amazon air bubble envelopes. Maybe its an issue that the drives arent shipped better protected? Not sure. The delivery driver dropped it off quite carefully, though. No idea what happened to the drive in between...

Ordered 6 6TB drives for a new QNAP NAS. So far they are performing very well. Unfortunately Amazon shipped the drives loose in a large box with only a bunch of air pillow packing filled in on top. Drives were in sealed mylar, but as can be seen in damaged mylar, the drives were banging around while the box was being shipped. installed them and was able to get the NAS online, but one drive immediately started giving bad block errors, is going back for replacement.

no instruction, no warranty papers, etc. now I am not sure if that item is new or a returned repackage item. I have not decided to keep it or return it . I have never received an electronic/computer part or device that did not contain those documents. Also no instructions on how and where to register the HDD. I will update this when and if I decide to keep or return it.

Chose these drives because of reviews and recommendations by chassis manufacturer. Have been on-line 24/7 for home LAN usage (backup server ... not file-serving) and pleased so far (5 days). Using them in linux filesystem (btrfs) software RAID1 configuration.

Seems lists of neg reviews due to warranty “issues” ie, 30 days, 3 mo, 1 yr, and etc. online WD states “in warranty” and their tech support (24/7) stated 5 yr. Amz, Cust service also confirmed. The 14TB Pro drives are amazing. What an upgrade from 2TB/5200/64MB units! They’re also sound the same as my 2TB so no worries there either. Put 5 drives into older Drobo and no issues. Dual redundancy in 30 min. What more to say? Drobo firmware at factory reset, 3.6.1 Dashboard, perfect. Updated firmware and all apps. Oh, 24/7 real person support when I called, no delays and very helpful. Very few products are 100% perfect, this is one. Price was excellent on Prime Day as well.

I had ordered the WD 16TB Elements External Hard Drive. Had problems with it. So I ordered a Terramaster D5-300C DAS and put two of the 14TB WD Red Pro NAS drives in it. They work fine in the DAS. I put the two drives in RAID 1 to have two backups of everything. Read my review on the Terramaster DAS on Amazon.

Excellent, and got these at a great price too.