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

I now have 3 x 8TB WD Red Pro and 2x 12 TB Red PRo in my Synology DS920+ NAS I had 2 running as RAID-1 for several months (3145 hours), Im now switching to RAID-5 (SHR) with a 3rd drive. They are on the supported list for Synology as NAS Enterprise type. On black Friday i bought 1x 12TB for the price of an 8TB. I wanted to buy another one but because Amazon was out of stock I bought the 2nd one straight from WD Online store (same price). The 2nd drive arrived and was DOA. It took almost a month of back and forth with WD support to finally get a replacement drive. On the plus side they gave me free shipping on return, but it was really hard to get them to accept to do an RMA. Anyways, the replacement works fine, all is up and running, I was a bit lucky that this was an additional drive and not a time-critical replacement. Remember that you also need to back-up your NAS even if you have redundant drives (the NAS itself could fail or you could delete the wrong folder - redundantly!). I will try to update this if one starts to fail, hopefully many years from now.

Recently an old raid system failed me and one drive went with it. Decided to replace it all with these new variant Red Pros in 4TB model. I received drives all dated late January 2023.. it is only March so they are minty fresh. My previous 4TB red drives from 2014 would write at around 145MB/s. These new pro versions write at around 245-250MB/s (larger video files). Massive improvement for archive and backup purposes. Drives are also SILENT. I have a test unit running next to me and I cant even hear it while it writes, in an open docking station. So far, very impressed.

Great drives for the Synology NAS DS220+. Have a good warranty and are designed to be used with a NAS.

First comment: Typical Amazon Quality Service. So far WD4TB Pro bare hard drive is absolutely quiet, vibrationless, super easy to initialize then format to ExFAT and only slightly warm to the touch. Hooked it up with a Unitek IDE/SATA to USB C 3.0 Adapter for now before mounting in stand alone case. Been using WD drives for a number of years so expect this new one will be as durable as the last.

Got my drive today and it runs as expected. I can only say if you have a loud drive then you ordered a knockoff. My Pro drive runs at same noise level as any other drive in my system. My warranty status is perfect 5 years so I ordered another to have on hand which was probably dumb since these will probably outlive warranty by many years. Probable use it to back some lower priority data

No failures.

These work, I replaced the same model with 52k hours on them.

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...

I purchased a pair of these on Black Friday 2021 well in advance of when I would actually need to use them. They sat on my shelf unopened in their original boxes for over 3 months. When I went to install and use them, one drive was OK. (I have a pair of media servers with 24 large drives in them) The other drive was riddled with errors, would not format and made any machine it was connected to unstable. This is a BRAND NEW DRIVE WITH ZERO HOURS ON IT!!! Because of my own stupidity I did not test them when I got them. Now for that mistake I can only get my new drive replaced with a used refurbished drive. It gets worse. I have had TREMENDOUS trouble getting into my Western Digital account and receiving information from Western Digital. I guess Western Digital is an Indian or Pakistan company. I cannot understand these people. I have spent days and days and more days on the phone just trying to get an RMA. I sent the drive to California where it was received and has sat for 4 weeks. Western Digital does not even show they received my drive yet and that they are still waiting for it. I called them on the phone and they looked it up and promised to update things. Nothing has happened in a further 2 weeks. It is my conclusion that Western Digital warranties are worthless. I wasted $400 on one of drives and the alternative drive company is even worst than this.

The price for these was GREAT, I bought a diskless WD PR4100 to put these in and built a 72TB storage device for about half the retail price of a prebuilt unit..