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

I have been around computers since the mid 80s and remember purchasing my first hard drive. It was for my Apple II in an enclosure about half the size of the computer with a self-contained power supply, fans and all sorts of what were then, goodies. It was an SCSI drive and it had a whopping 25 megabytes of space at my disposal. The hard drive was a Shugart, named after the fellow that built them and the predecessor of what is today, Seagate. There was a period of time in the 90s where my experiences with what were then the kingpins of hard drives, WD and Seagate simply did not prove reliable in a server or NAS environment which is why I always ended up paying top dollar for SCSI servers and enterprise drives that were significantly more expensive than an equivalent ATAPI desktop drive. When Samsung introduced their line of desktop drives, for the first time I felt comfortable using them in a server environment where they run 24/7. Today, after testing hard drives as they come out in both sizes and formats, I found that by far, WD has the best NAS drives for the money and they are not that much more expensive than a regular desktop drive. In fact, the WD Black line, which is intended for desktops is also a terrific drive and would not hesitate to stick them in a NAS box with one from their Red line. But I say so only from the point of view of reliability. As in the past I often found that anyone selling a non scuzzy drive claimed they were purpose built for a server environment, I questioned it as it seemed that I could not see any tangible evidence of them being anything more than the same drive as any other with a different label and a higher price. I can quantify the difference even between a WD Black drive and the Red NAS line. The transfer speeds are higher and they dont run nearly as hot which explains their great longevity under enterprise environment. There are still good reasons for going with enterprise scuzzy drives if that is what you need and can afford it. But for the everyday person that simply wants to keep their data backed up off site or off their PC, the WD Red line is a terrific drive and deliver a lot of bang for the buck. I presently have a location where I run 10 NAS boxes with two to four hard drives each and over time, the WD Red drives have outlasted Seagates equivalents -- by a long shot. That is not meant to be a put down of Seagate because I use their hybrid drives on my desktops and they are terrific. I personally prefer them to WDs Black line even though I know they are also great drives. I must admit that I am baffled when I read about someone these days getting, say, 4 new drives and one or two being DOA. Maybe Ive been fortunate, but I have purchased hundreds if not thousands of hard drives and I have yet to get one tha was DOA. Some clearly perform better than others and last longer than others, but as a whole, I would say the hard drive market is extremely mature and whether they are made in China or the US, makes no difference. All I can say is that in my experience and for my needs, the WD Red line is an excellent NAS drive and will continue to use them in the foreseeable future. Something else may come out that it is better or not. But when one is dealing with a NAS environment, there isnt much room for testing new equipment if the one I use now meets my needs and has proven itself. As my needs change, I will go through due diligence in determining what will be best. But at least presently, there are alternatives to SCSI if you do not need it and the prices per megabyte are lower than ever. I highly recommend this line of drives from WD for its intended use.

I trust my music, movie, and picture collections on these. I have a few of these. One of them is over a year old and I have had no issues with it at all. Ive bought many hard drives and have had many failures from all of the big brand names including WD, Seagate, Toshiba, etc.. I admit, I push my hard drives to the limits. They are often on 24/7 and are running because I also run a server through them. I should probably upgrade to data base/enterprise drives but so far these have outstood all of the other drives I have used. I often experience failures on newer drives within the first 6 months because off the high usage they get. I run a hard drive program to keep an eye out now on my drives (HD Sentinel). Ive noticed the drives that I have that are not NAS approved are down to a health rating of just fair, while my current NAS drive that I bought around the same time is in excellent condition. All my NAS drives are in a MediaSonic ProBox enclosure and they seem to get plenty of cooling power to never have to worry about heat.. and the enclosure never jumps into a higher fan speed then the lowest setting so they must be producing hardly any heat themselves. From now on Ill forget about spending any money on anything less then a NAS drive. I feel secure again about where my data is stored and dont have to worry about failing drives like I have for so often before. The drives are faster then I thought. Dont let the 5400 RPM speed fool you. These drives can easily stream 4k content without a glitch. Super fast accessing time as well. I highly recommend these drives.

TLDR: it works as expected and theres nothing more reassuring than that especially when its at this price point. I tried buying from Amazon. I got it after a couple of weeks which is pretty fast since its international shipping after the holidays. Plugged it in and it was detected immediately without problems and works as expected and specs are as specified in WD website. The one I bought locally was just a brick. Cant get detected so its useless. I should have just bought from Amazon instead of buying from a local unknown seller.

I purchased several of these hard drives to populate a NAS. I have been using Western Digital drives for decades and they have always been reliable and affordable. For my project, I under-estimated my drive requirements because I completely forgot about the dishonest business practice of drive manufactures counting 1000KB = 1MB. In real life, 1024KB = 1MB. The end result is that the consumer loses space and the manufacturer gets to advertise a larger capacity than what the hard drive can actually deliver. In a 4-bay NAS using 8TB drives, basic math says 4 drives x 8TB = 32TB of storage. In reality, you only get 29TB (4x7.25), which is a significant loss of 3TB over what the manufacturer advertises! Grrr!

Im not sure I understand the marketing concept of a Red Drive, but I live in a Red State so... Anyway these drives are low power, cool, and quiet. Compared to the WD Black drives, they are a dream come true. I had been using black drives on my desktop and in a USB holder and they made so much noise and vibration I simply dont understand how they can function. I gave the USB mounted drive to my son to put into his computer and went Red. The red drives are silent, have no vibration, and the performance hit is minimal. From what I can tell, they spin down to low RPM when not in use, but they do not stop. This allows them to spin up much faster than drives that are stopped. Even at full use they are very low energy devices. By comparison a Black WD drive will be HOT to the touch. These stay at room temperature without a fan! I think the Red product line is the future of hard drives. I fully expect these drives will dramatically outlast their warranty, and I would wager that the application of higher end mechanical construction like that used in the higher performance drives could result in the industries first 10 year warranty. My view is that the red product line is serious SSD competition, and with the application of some systems technology, hard drives will never be replaced by SSDs, until we can store data in a true crystalline structure that does not need rocket science to fix the errors created by use. Ive been in the computer industry consuming hard drives since the 5 MByte hard drives were high tech (thats not a typo, 5 Megabytes), and these drives are the best. Eventually I hope to replace everything here with them primarily because of the power savings and performance. Power consumption effects everything from your UPC performance to your electric bill to your noise budget from high capacity fans. Marketing could do a much better job on these red drives - for instance I bet they pay for themselves over other drives in power savings in time; I doubt they require fans in many home applications especially if the fans are modulated by the drives temperature sensors; and the lack of vibration and noise is a huge plus. Although I maintain a triple level backup strategy (called experience), I have not encountered any issues in spite of continuous use 24/7 for Windows (which is a frightening OS for disk usage). /Len

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.

I am a big fan of these WD Red NAS drives as I have several synology servers. Ive had pretty good luck with WD Black drives as those are extremely solid (and fast compared to these and the WD Greens), but these run significantly hotter which raises the overall temp of my NAS devices. The WD Green drives run cooler (and just about as fast as these WD Red drives), but are not good for NAS environments due to the TLER issue (they constantly spin up and down which adds needless wear and tear and will ultimately reduce the longevity of your drive). These arent the fastest drives out there, but they offer the perfect balance and are safe for use in NAS systems. I also had a lot of success with Samsung drives, but these were bought out by Seagate and, while I respect Seagates quality control, they are not comparible with SMART diagnostics, which is how synology units (and most diagnostic protocols) monitor the health of your drive. While my one seagate drive in operation has never failed me, I dont appreciate the fact that when and if it ever does, I will have zero warning. Therefore, I stick with WD drives so that I can monitor their health and replace them when and if they start developing bad sectors. Seagate seems to have done away with SMART compatibility so that end users could not diagnose the drives themselves. They probably got tired of people trying to RMA drives because of a single bad sector. So Seagate users are forced to use Seatools to examine their drives, which gives you only a passing (or failing grade) with no gray area in between (i.e. no hints that your drive is about to fail as long as it is still operating within what Seagate considers acceptable parameters). Its a shame too because my one Seagate drive is among the fastest I own and has worked solidly for 3+ years. I just dont completely trust it without the SMART data.

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.

I ordered 3 of these back in October of last year to use in my HTPC. Recently I was running out of space and ordered another one along with 3 - 4TB Greens for a backup solution. Upon reading up about the greens, which I had never ordered before, I learned about WDs WDIDLE3 utility that some people are using to set the Head Park timer from 8 seconds to 5 minutes and thus reducing the amount of times the heads park. Since the Greens are only rated at 300k cycles, you could see how quickly those would add up of they are parking every 8 seconds after use. On a whim, I decided to check the new Red drive I just purchased to see what its timer was set to, it was 5 minutes. I then checked the Red drives I purchased here from Amazon back in October of last year, the same 4TB model as the one I just ordered. To my surprise, all 3 were set to 8 seconds and my head park count was already at 18k in a matter of months. I used the utility and set those to 5 minutes as well. Performance of the drive was not really what I bought them for, but they seem to be fine. Their not Black drives and 7200 RPMs, so their not as quick as what I have in my gaming machine, but they work just fine for my HTPC.

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.