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 bought these after reading they were for NAS use. I have a QNAP 8 bay NAS. I bought them to replace WD green 2TB drives (which I had suffered regular failures with when used in hardware RAID on my Gigabyte motherboard hardware RAID 5 setup). I read that desktop drives do not have TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) - which can cause the drives to be dropped from your array when errors are encountered if the drive tries to recover for more than ~12 seconds. These RED drives have TLER built in and will limit recovery time to ~7 seconds or so so the drives are not dropped by the RAID controller. I might not have bought them had I read the NewEgg reviews first, as the reviews are horrible, but Amazon Prime had a great price on these, so I never even considered NewEgg and therefore did not read the reviews. So...with cautious apprehension, I installed two of these in the last 48 hours, allowing each to rebuild on the array. They were packed safely in OEM type cardboard boxes with plastic inserts and then placed into a larger Amazon box with packing material, so they were not beat up. Neither was DOA, and both installed and re-populated with no issues. Only time will tell what the reliability of these is going to be long term, but so far...so good. I am also going to buy a pair of Seagate 3TB NAS drives, and Ill be doing a little reliability shootout to see which lasts longer. With 8 bays total, something is bound to fail at some point, but Im only running four drives for now. Ill report back if and when one fails.

I have been a long term western digital customer for over 10yrs. This drive is aimed and marketed at NAS type devices however also very good in a regular desktop computer system as a storage drive, which is how I am currently using it for my personal desktop system . I have owned this red drive for approx. 10 days now. The sustained transfer speed is very good. the lower / variable spindle speed compared to normal 7200RPM drives doesnt impact its performance for my use . It performs better then my 4TB WD green drive. My Red drive was installed in a computer with many hard drives and it runs at a cool 84F (29 C ) at idle, the lowest temp. drive in the computer. Also according to the Red drive spec sheet uses the least amount of power as well. Time limited error recovery (TLER) is one of the benefits for the Red drives , outlined in the youtube video podcast below. A popular weekly hardware video podcast with storage editor at PC Perspective ( pcper) Allyn Malventano addressing uses of red model drives: https://youtu.be/WjjCMWZ0aDU?t=51m I included a start time for later in the podcast @ 51 minutes, the start of discussion of WD red drives and its use in NAS and non NAS systems Some valuable info on NAS / RAID design can be found in this video as well. plus other general server hardware info is addressed. At time 55:40 in the the video more info and insight regarding DIY home NAS and RAID stability, reliability and design is discussed as well. Potentially saving a DIY person some pretty decent cash and at least some calories reading conflicting information online. All of which for some buyers reading reviews on amazon for this product would find useful or at least interesting. For me, my drives in my personal computer for this review are used for pure storage via Linux based operating systems. In some computer systems ive built are media servers, again using linux with LVM and sometimes MDADM , other times using RAID cards such as IBM M1015 , a cheaper version, of more expensive promise model cards with SAS. HGST is another maker of hard drives with good reputation and within the same general price range for some of their models, however western digital now owns them, formally Hitachi Global Storage Technologies . Ive not taken the time while writing this to check if HGST drives feature some of the features the Red model line up offers. If you are going for a gaming system drive or require heavy I/O for a operating system drive, the red of course wouldnt be your best option. I use a WD Black drive, # WD3003FZEX for this . Steam games fill a drive quickly. With my budget and limited sata ports it makes a SSD fairly useless for storing games , or a media server gaming rig combo. Most of the time, once game is loaded , its mostly done , leaving the CPU and GPU left doing the work... . so for my needs esp dual booting , gaming on linux and windows using a Black model drive is my best option for my hardware , storage and requirements to have one type of operating system running most of the time. I do sometimes run Linux on a stand alone 120GB SSD , if I disconnect my optical drive , smaller ssd drives are quite inexpensive now and do make life a bit easier esp on aging desktop hardware. The cost per TB in a black model is still quite low for the performance level and the only high performance drive to offer a 5 year warranty standard. Especially when compared to a hybrid model drives cost and other drive makers of fast mechanical and hybrid solutions. Heavy gaming via steam would make a hybrid drives nand cache not very effective , fairly quickly iirc . Hopefully some of this info will prove useful , or at least give some starting ground to look into , research options deeper that may not have been considered before.

The 8TB drives I have received arrived on time and work fine. They also appear to be CMR technology. If you are considering any other size (less than 8TB in the WD RED product line) for used in a NAS or any RAID configuration, I suggest you google SMR vs CMR. I will not try to explain SMR, other than saying, it is designed to perform well under light load. Many users are complaining about performance of SMR drives in NAS devices during array rebuilds (whenever you extend/expand/replace drives in an array). I have not had a problem with the 8TB drive I purchased, but I did have another SMR drive that failed during a rebuild. Infact the SMR drive that appeared to fail, tested fine when it was removed from the array but under the heavy load of a rebuild the drive was performing so poorly that the system thought it had failed. At the time I am writing this, the WD RED 2 - 6 TB drives appear to be SMR based. The WD RED 8TB and all the WD RED Pro appear to be CMR.

Just bought 2 drives advertised as Used: Like New | Details Sold by TechnoDealsUSA These drive pass all the S.M.A.R.T test but they have both be run for 48,000+ hours virtually non stop. That is over 5.5 years. I would not exactly call them Like New. I only saved about 20% buying used over new. I hope I dont regret this.

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 -

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.

Review for: WD Red 2 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD20EFRX I have 4 of these in my ReadyNAS NV+. They replaced four 1.5TB drives that had filled up and also periodically require a boot scan that would take hours to complete. These WD Drives have yet to need a boot scan. Transfer speeds with the new drives across my network did drop by about 20% from the old 7200 RPM drives. There a many complaints about new hard drives being DOA. Mechanical abuse is always a concern but drives can survive hard knocks surprisingly well when theyre not running. A more likely reason for DOA is user failure to treat these static sensitive devices with at least minimal electro-static discharge (ESD) avoidance procedures. Touching an earth ground before opening that silvery bag can make the difference between a functioning drive and a door stop. Avoid touching the drives circuit board and connector contacts. During winter heating season, the human body can easily acquire a 10,000 volt or greater charge just walking around the room. Do you sometimes get shocked touching a doorknob? Ideally, wear a simple grounding wrist strap connected to a known good earth ground before handling any ESD sensitive electronic component. One can be purchased here for less than $2: http://www.amazon.com/Static-Wrist-Strap-Discharge-Grounding/dp/B00530GDHG/ref=sr_1_4?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1395771639&sr=1-4&keywords=grounding+strap 6/4/2017 Update: One the the 4 drives failed after 3 years and was replaced with the same model. The 3 original drives and the replacement continue to operate nominally in the ReadyNAS NV+. 3/7/2019 Update: all drives continue to run nominally.

When I received my drive, I didnt notice that the ant-static bag had already been opened - it was hidden by part of the packing material. So when I went to install the drive today, I was very disappointed to see I had been shipped an open drive. But I need a drive this weekend for my project, so I thought Id give it a shot. There were partitions on the drive already, but I could not read them. I thought Ill just format the drive and see how it performs. Well, that is when I found out about GPT. This is important if you are buying a drive in excess of 2.2 TB (like this one). Unless you can use GPT with your OS, you cannot create a single partition containing the entire 3 TB. And if you do use GPT, some versions of motherboards cannot use it as a boot drive. My guess is another poor consumer found this out the hard way and returned the disk. Since I dont need to boot from this drive, I elected to use the diskpart.exe utility in windows to clean the drive, and then use disk manager to initialize and format the drive. Here is hoping that the drive works well after that. Stay tuned for updates. Update: Amazon took very good care of me when it came to the used drive. Im more than satisfied with their handling of the problem. So far the drive is fine, and I expect it will work as I hoped. I upped my review to four stars in light of Amazons customer service.

Over the years Ive purchased several WD red drives for my Synology home NAS. I started with the 4TB, then moved up to 6TB and finally 8TB. I havent had a chance to try the 10TBs yet, since the price is still up there unless you REALLY need the space (time of writing is mid-2018). But Im sure Ill get there eventually. Prior to the reds being available, I purchased many of the WD green drives (at least 7 at last count). Unfortunately, the greens were not designed for NAS use, so you had to find a Linux system to plug the drive into to change a firmware setting to disable a 300 second idle timeout... the drives idling repeatedly in a 24-hour environment after many months of use would eventually add additional wear and tear on the greens that would reduce their overall lifespan significantly. The reds were definitely a nice addition to the WD lineup, as they were the first budget drive from WD that were specifically designed for (home) NAS use... no firmware tweaks necessary. OK, enough of the history lesson. I would rate the WD green drives as being very reliable, but not perfect. I believe I received one that was DOA, which was an easy process with Amazon to ship back and replace. During many years of operation (my first green was purchased in 2009 and is still going strong today after continuous use for almost 9 years), I only had 1 drive that failed in my NAS. It disconnected from the array, which immediately degraded the RAID. The drive that failed was not the oldest drive that I owned, so I ran the SMART tests and everything came back A-OK. I let the Synology rebuild the RAID array with the failed drive, and everything seemed to be working for a couple of months... until it disconnected again. This was a good indication that it was time to replace the drive, which I did. OK, so Ive had a pretty good history with WD drives. Getting back to the reds, I own at least 6 of them in various capacities. First, let me say that none have ever failed outright or caused any data loss in my system, so overall their track record is great. However, both of the 6TB reds that Ive purchased have had multiple disk re-identification events in my NAS. These re-identification events have not caused any data loss, nor do they require a rebuild of the RAID array. Synology says that re-identification events are an early warning sign that the drive could fail, so to keep an eye on these events to see if theyre increasing in frequency... if so its probably time to replace the drive(s) to avoid any potential data loss. On both of my 6TB reds, Im averaging about 1 disk re-identification event every 12 to 18 months, so Im not overly concerned. Ive never seen any strange events (re-identification, re-connection, bad sectors, etc.) on any of the 4TB or 8TB reds that I own, so this problem seems to be specific to the 6TB model (or its a huge coincidence). My 6TB reds were purchased in 2014 and 2015, so its possible that whatever was causing the issue was corrected. I have the 6TB reds loaded into a backup NAS, but I will personally not be purchasing any more of them. YMMV. Overall Im giving these drives 4 stars. If possible, Id give 3 stars to the 6TB reds (simply due to the anxiety factor), and 5 stars to the other reds (well, at least the 4TB and 8TB, which Ive had personal experience with), but Amazon does not allow for split review ratings.

So far VERY GOOD. I actually just purchased this to use as a backup drive and I had a very specific mission that this helped me complete. From I dont know, 1999-Now Ive used close to 15 drives, going back to 16gb (or so) HDDs which were big back in the 90s up to 1tb drives of today, but I had a huge problem of missing files. Photos in particular. I was using drive bays to attach the old drives to the PC and try and search them all at once but Windows search really sucks. (Yes I should have booted into Ubuntu - shame on me), but I said, you know what, enough is enough, I know WD has these 6tb drives, let me literally copy the contents of ALL of the drives Ive ever owned onto it, and do one main search. Thanks to this drive, and some other creative methods *dusts self off* I did one big search of everything on this drive and found lots of old treasures, including the fountain of youth, just kidding. In recent weeks I realized, well, not that it would have helped with Windows not recognizing/initializing certain drives, but a freeware app like UltraSearch does things that windows explorer search refuses to, I guess Windows Explorer has dark moods, was tired of me playing Iggy Azalea on it, and went on strike when I tried to search for things; UltraSearch casts no aspersions with respect to my musical interests, so it just does searches for me regardless... Lo and behold, while I couldnt copy ALL the drives I own onto it, nor did I need to with respect to trying to find files from 10+ years ago, I was able to (with the help of Ubuntu), recover data off of drives that Windows 7 no longer read, but Ubuntu did, thanks Microsoft, and recover otherwise lost data onto this 6TB RED, and other newer drives from the 2000s. Its still got about 1.5tb free so Ill be using this as a third backup drive, keeping it disconnected from the PC not even in a NAS device, so I figure it will last ALOT longer. Perhaps putting it into a safe deposit box will ensure its survival in case of another Hurricane Sandy, or an Iggy Azalea attack of some sort.