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

These are just hard drives, but I really like the Reds because I know that I can just plug them in and not worry about them - reliable and very low noise/vibration. They cost more than alternatives, but they are work horses and my data is important. In that regard, they are a bargain. My only complaint (which is not significant enough to deserve a lower rating) is with WDs warranty/replacement process and Amazons extended warranty offerings - These are NAS drives. Im (personally, YMMV) using mine in RAID 1 configurations. I dont want to pay $15 for a data recovery plan (Amazon addon, not WD; thats what the RAID mirroring is for). If a drive fails, I just want the unit replaced. QUICKLY! Id rather have the option to buy one of those cheaper PC/Peripheral Protection Plans from SquareTrade (or whichever vendor is the best option for this sort of thing). If one fails under warranty, I just want a replacement ASAP with a return shipping label and NO HASSLE - I dont need to pay for someone to recover the data because I already have it, and I dont want to argue with some call center where English is not their native language. I just want it replaced now and I am willing to pay extra for that. At the very least, such a thing would be a nice addon/option. I try to avoid irritation whenever Im allowed, even if it costs me a bit more up front.

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.

We bought two WD 3TB Reds to go in a Synology DS213 NAS. The drive installed as drive one in a modified Raid 1 array that Synology calls SHR has been fine in the month or more its been running. The second drive crashed after a week. I elected to return it to Western Digital for replacement under their Advance Replacement program, whereby they ship the new drive, and one simply returns the defective drive in that packaging. There are several kickers. One is that they put a hold on a credit card until they get the old drive returned, and its for $250- much more than the going price on Amazon, so be sure to return it within the 30 days given. The other caveat is that shipping the old drive back is on you. That will currently run $15 insured to return the drive UPS. Anyhow, I promptly received the replacement drive, installed it (this is extremely easy in the Synology NAS), and lo and behold, although it ran normally it would not pass the extended S.M.A.R.T. test. I notified WD, and they asked if I wanted to replace it. I stated that I did not if it meant I was going to have to pay for shipping a second time. They sent me a new drive (that had been pre-tested) plus a prepaid return shipping label. This new drive is installed and running fine. The WD Red series is designed to run in NAS applications, and presumably it does. I give the highest marks here to Western Digital for how the problem I had was handled. All manufactured products have a certain number of defective units, nobody can do anything about that. The real test of a manufacturer is how they deal with such issues, and that went very well in my case.

Both drives came well packet and undamaged. Did thorough block check and both came back as good. Installed them in NAS with two other matching drives I got a few weeks back. Total four WD Red 3TB NAS drives now. Made sure at latest firmware, also turned head parking off. Used zfs raidz2 with lz4 compression. I now have 5.2TB of space that can stand an any two drive failure. Getting uncompressed transfer speeds over 170MBs. They are quite and cool. Very happy so far. 12-30-2015. Had a drive fail out of the four in my NAS. I used ZFS mirrored stripes, raind10, with four of these drives. Bad drive was spitting CRC errors to console. Tried different cabels and controller. Still error. Ordered another drive and problem is gone. Now. RMA from WD website. Decided to rebuild NAS from scratch, after backup of course. New version of ZFS . now my scrub speed is 248MB. 4/4/2016. Purchased two more of these and added another mirrored vdev to my stripe. 3TB more usable space and the speed of an extra spindle. I plan on getting two more in a few weeks for the total of 8 drives in 4 mirrored vdevs all in one stripe. It wont keep my 10Gb network busy but im getting 350MB in transfers across the wire now. hoping to get over 400MB when I ad the last 2 drives. Update 8/10/2016 - I know have 8 WD drives are on a Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 Add-on Card, 8-Channel SAS/SATA Adapter with 600MB/s per Channel in a PCIE x16 running at x8 on a Supermicro ATX DDR4 LGA 1151 C7Z170-OCE-O Motherboard with 64GB DDR4 RAM. I am running CentOS 7 kernel 4.7 with Btrfs 4.7 and btrfs-prods 4.7. I have the 8 drives in a RAID10 btrfs pool. I also have my PC and ESXi server attached to this NAS via Intel CNA 10Gb dual port cards using SFP+ DACs. I am getting non cached reads/writes at over 500MB via windows smd share. Smooth line at that i might add. My ESXi server has a NFS mount to the pool were I store most of my guest images. 8 seconds for a non cache Windows Server 2012 image to boot to login screen. Oh ya, cached reads/writes are 1.2GBs (1,200MB) over my network, yikes scoob! Update 01/25/2017 - I know have 11 of these drives. 8 of them are in my NAS, 2 in PC running RAID1, and another spare in the box in-case i have drive go bad. They are not fastest drives but work well for me.

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.

If you compare ratings, most of these drives from the leading competitors are neck to neck. In the 4TB category, I went with WD RED NAS drives because they have a lot of good time-tested-metrics that show theyre worth it. Not just immediate out of the box stuff. But a few years now, of tried and true testing. If you want a reliable (consumer level reliable) always-on drive, the RED NAS drives are the way to go for cost. I almost got a Seagate NAS drive, but ultimately the REDs came out on top. There are more reliable drives out there, enterprise level. But if youre just looking for large storage capacity, with reliability of being on a lot and being used a lot, the REDs are a great way to go. Do not put all your eggs in one basket. No drive is fool proof. They will fail eventually. Might be a year. Might be 10 years. Dont gamble with important data. Always have a backup of your data. I use mine a data backup of photos, large sums of data. These are cheap enough to make that a non-issue at $140 per 4TB drive. If youve never used something larger than 2TB in your windows platform, make sure you read up on how to accommodate & use this size partition. It will depend on your motherboard, which version of windows youre using, and how you intend to format this drive. I run windows 7 64bit on a bulldozer based motherboard. So for me, I simply plopped it in, went to the drive in Computer Management under Admin Tools, changed the drive to GTP instead of MBR, and made a new volume with the entire capacity, then formatted it with my filesystem. Good to go.

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!

Why 4 Stars instead of 5? The fact is that every mechanical hard drive will eventually fail depends on the usage and its manufacturing process control. However I can say these are the second most reliable drives. The at first place is HGST no doubt. If you are budget conscious, these are the best. I recommend to have same series drives in your NAS to get best performance and reliability. I was in habit to have a different capacity of the drives with multiple manufacturerers and ended up with frustration and no data loss thanks to the data protection and parity of the volume. I started to build my NAS with a set of 2x2TB drives and over time I increased my storage to 10TB with the same drives. Ill stick with 2TB drives to expand my storage until WD will stop manufacture not due to the fact that these are the cheapest, it is due to the fact of the existing set of drives. Im not even expecting any drive will last long as 5 years. The first set of drives which I bought is now surpassed more than three and half year and no bad sectors yet. Although Ill be expecting the first failure of the drive within a year. At the end, I say I didnt made a bad decision.

Ive got 4 of these running in RAIDZ1 in a TrueNAS Core machine I keep at my house as a backup to the main TrueNAS Core box I keep at my parents place. Theyve been running continuously for almost a year now, 312 days or 7492 hours. In that time, not a single error or fault has developed. All 4 drives were purchased right here and are in warranty through WD. No third-party OEM shenanigans here, at least for me I actually bought these right before the whole SMR debacle hit. These drives, the WD40EFRX were listed as the older model compared to the newer WD40EFAX. They were cheaper at the time too so I went for these instead of the newer drive which, upon first glance at the time, only had a smaller amount of cache. Wasnt worth the extra money because I was using these in RAIDZ with a large amount of RAM anyway. So, whatever I thought...boy did I luck out! The WD40EFRX is now listed as a WD Red Plus drive. Plus indicating its CMR instead of regular Red SMR drives. Newer isnt always better! - PSA: DO NOT BUY WD RED SMR DRIVES FOR USE IN A ZFS or HARDWARE RAID ENVIROMENT. YOU WILL HAVE PROBLEMS IF YOU HAVE TO REBUILD AN ARRAY AFTER DISK FAILURE. Purchase a CMR drive instead for this use case -

I purchased 2 of these drives as a replacement for two standard WD Red drives for my new Synology ds220+ NAS. The NAS could not be found on the wired network. Did some research and they do not always play well with Synology. Replaced with the plus drives and setup was quick and easy. They are silent when not being written to and with small transfers of data (few Mb) They emit a sound when transferring large amounts of data >2-3 Gbs. It was easy to install in Synology but that is a Synology review. Currently have almost 50% of the drive used with parity drive so if one fails, I can just swap it out and rebuild the drive without loss of data.