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

Usually love WD, disappointed it died a few days after Amazons 30 day warranty and they wont even consider it. We are talking 3 days... Will try to get a replacement through WD but there are already warnings on WDs site that they are behind in replacing drives..... Update: 5/18 - WARNING WARNING WARNING.... Western Digital is claiming these are OEM drives (even though it isnt listed anywhere in their description) and WILL NOT HONOR A WARRANTY. Buy at your own risk because they will not replace it!!!!!!!! Very disappointed in Western Digital and these dirty tactics and Very disappoint in AMAZON for allowing the Bait & Switch- False Advertising!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Update 5/19 - Western Digital says my drive is OEM and made in 2014. So they are selling 9 year old drives as new and not OEM. Amazon allows them to continue this fraud. Amazon wont stand behind the product that failed 32 days in. Western Digital wont replace it because of the OEM. And the Seller claims they cant replace it because Amazon has all their stock. DO NOT BUY THIS!!!! SCAM

Great drives. Ive got 4x 4TB Reds in a custom server i made that has been running for 2+ years pretty much 24/7. Had to replace a failing Seagate drive (my fault using a standard Desktop HDD in a build like this) and these just work, and well. Build: CPU: ................Intel Core i5-4430 3.0GHz Quad-Core Processor Motherboard.......ASRock Z87E-ITX Mini ITX LGA1150 Motherboard Memory.............Kingston Blu 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory Storage.............Crucial M500 120GB mSATA Solid State Disk Storage.............4x Western Digital Red 4TB 3.5 5900RPM Internal Hard Drive Case.................Fractal Design Node 304 Mini ITX Tower Case Power Supply.....Rosewill Capstone 450W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply Running Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials and Pooled using Stablebit Drive Pool. I use it to serve up movies and TV shows via Plex, backup my other computers, and as a storage server. These Red drives work well as they are built for NAS usage and so they work well in situations where they are spun down frequently. I have considered the Seagate NAS drives too as they are sometimes cheaper but Ive had some issues with Seagate drives in the past (still use a 3TB one in my main desktop) and I have never in 20+ years had an issue with a WD drive. Others mileage may vary. For now and my needs 4x these are plenty of space with room to grow. Would be nice if they came out with 8+TB versions sometime soon though at an affordable price point. Seagate has had a 8TB drive out for a while and its generally cheaper than the 6TB Red, however im not sure how reliable the 8TB Seagate drive is.

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.

I bought these to run in a RAID Array after my WD Blue RAID array kept failing. The RED drives, with their TLER support, prevent arrays from breaking due to read/write delays unlike the blue drive,s which was the issue I was having. Also, with their 3D Active Balance Plus you can run them in multi drive environments (or even in a PC with other fans running) without fear of increased wear/tear or damage. At first I had thought all the technology was just gimmick, but when my Blue array kept failing, I upgraded to these and havent had a single issue since. They are not the fastest drives available, but then again most people with NAS dont have enclosures fast enough to take advantage of the increased speed regardless... I use my HP Z600 as my NAS, which allows me to use the data/drives without a network bottleneck locally, and allows my other computers to access it through the LAN. It works well for what Im using it for. Overall, I can say Id buy them again. They have been running 24/7 for 7 months now without any issues, so so far, so good. Ill update this review if anything changes.

If you can still find one that they are not gouging for, buy it. Its not that quiet but it its better than the 7200 RPM drives, spins up fast and runs cool. Fast enough for my home media server and would be really fast in a striped RAID. Time will tell how long it lasts.

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.

Excellent Drives. Ive been running a variety of WD Red, Green, and Seagate Archive Drives for the better part of several years, and I thought that I would share some useful advice for things to watch out for when buying new drives, and detecting infant mortality. First thing to look for is to observe the packaging the drive arrives in. It is industry practice to ship one or more drives in boxes that are made to perfectly fit the drive. Inside the box, the drive should be suspended with two plastic holders. These holders suspend the drive and dampen any drops the package may experience during transit. (Bulk orders (15+) may be shipped in a single larger box with foam cut-out arrays). Secondly, when installing the drives, make sure that your hands are clean. Give them a wash, or better yet, wear gloves. Avoid transferring finger/hand oil to the drives so that hot-spots arent created. Thirdly, once the drives are installed, give them a full, long format. You can run 1, 3, 5, (or even more) passes on the disks. This ensures that every single sector of the drives gets written to. Once the format is complete, look up the SMART data, and check the values for anything alarming. If a drive suffered damage in shipping, now is when it may be noticeable. Compare the values to your other drives. Start-up times, head parks and so fourth may vary slightly so theres nothing to be worried about a little deviation there, but pay attention to failed reads, reallocated sectors, and RUEs. Granted, all of this advice should be taken with a grain of salt since SMART values are not the silver bullet to predict drive failure, but this testing should be a good indicator on whether or not a drive is ready for production use. Above all else, remember that backups are your friend.

Ive been quite happy with these drives, so far, in a

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.

Im an HTPC enthusiast, and Im using this 10TB red drive in my Windows HTPC. Im running a 60GB SSD that holds my Windows 10 Pro OS, and then I have several other much larger internal drives that I store my audio/video files on. I would not recommend installing your operating system on a hard drive this large. I can only imagine the problems youd run into. I have been running these red drives as extra storage for awhile now, and they work extremely well for the intended purpose. Ive been replacing my smaller green drives as they have aged, and its sad that WD doesnt make the green drives in these larger sizes. Ive only found the blue drives in sizes up to 6TB, so these larger red drives really fit the bill. They are the only 5200rpm WD drives I can find this large. If I run out of space in the main hard drive bay, I always install them in a 5.25 inch bay adapter, with at least a 80cm cooling fan. The main drive bay has a bigger fan of its own. Make sure you have a fan blowing on these large drives. Without proper cooling they can reach temps of 50C+ really quick, and that can mean a loss of your precious files. Ive been collecting stuff for 25+ years and I cant risk a loss. So, I always do a full format on my new drives from the start. Its a great way to test a new drive before you start moving those files over to the new drive. A full format on a 10TB hard drive will take around 12.5 hours, so just let it run overnight. Your fully formatted size will be 9314GB under the Windows OS. If you dont understand that then search the internet, its everywhere as to why. This drive was sold as a Plus drive, but I didnt see it printed anywhere on the drive as you can see. It doesnt matter to me though, because I will not being using it in a NAS system. I wasnt real happy about the manufactured date because it was almost a year ago. Wouldve preferred a drive with a more recent date. Other than those 2 things, I havent run into any issues with these red drives. They function really well for extra storage in my HTPC, and Im going to buy more as the size increase. I sure do wish WD would make green or blue drives in these sizes, not sure why they dont.