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

Its hard to tell how good a hard drive is until its been used for a bit. I got two of these drives for my aging NAS to increase the storage capacity from 1 TB to 4 TB. After about 5 years of use I decided to retire the older drives for now. The WD Red 4 TB was on the approved hardware list for my NAS, and is the maximum capacity for each bay, so I am hitting the upper limit for now. I still have two empty bays for further future expansion when it is needed. The older drives that came with my ReadyNAS were WD Green drives that were not specifically made for a NAS so as they got older I was getting worried that they might fail. It was easy to transfer data over to the new Red drives by simply pulling out one of the older drives which breaks the disc array. Once the new drive is mounted on the tray and slid back in the bay the NAS copies the information from the redundant drive and resets the disc array. Once that is completed do the same to the other disc. Now I have 3.6TB of redundant storage (you lose some space in the formatting process). The WD Red 4TB drives definitely run cooler than the Green drives that they replaced, and so far have not given me a bit a trouble. They also have a similar noise level to the Green drives, which was not bad at all even if you are sitting next to them. Even though these discs are rated at 5400 RPM they stream HD video from the Plex server without any problems. They have similar reading speeds to the older Green drives, which isnt the fastest, but my NAS doesnt have a fast processor in it either. While these discs have a 3 year warranty Im hoping that I get at least 5 years out of them especially since these discs are specifically made to be run 24/7 in a NAS.

I bought four of these drives a month ago and have been evaluating them since. I was so pleased with them that I bought a set of four for my self. Pros: * Excellent performance on large read and write workloads such as backing up large files. I plan to use these to as backup/archive servers where they will have 16 to 500G individual files copied to them nightly. As single drives or in RAID 0 or 10 sets, performance has been very, very impressive. * Power consumption is very low at approximately 4-5 watts each. If youre using these for a home NAS unit then four drives will use about the same power as some of my single older 7200 RPM drives. This appeals to me from an environmental responsibility perspective as well as keeping my utility bills from climbing. * Very quiet: I dont hear them at all. * Cool to the touch: Since they dont use much power and spin rather slowly, they dont generate much heat and can tolerate hot environments rather well. * They can be made very fast by short-stroking them: allocating only the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the disk for a RAID array and using that. Seek times drop in half and the high platter density provides some incredible performance numbers. * Price is very good for 3 TB of reliable storage. Cons: * They are not ideal for heavy workload, high simultaneous-transaction environments. Their average seek time is about double what Im seeing on some of my Hitachi 1TB drives which are much more aggressive for transaction processing workloads but cost $100 more for the same size, use more power and generate more heat and noise.

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.

I got five of these in October 2021, and they have been working fine with TrueNAS in RAIDZ2 configuration.

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 -

Lets get this out of the way first, Im kind of a WD fanboy but with good reason I think. Ive been using them for as long as I can remember, and maybe its just my personal luck but I think theyve been better to me than any other brand. The only ones I dont really like are the Green drives, and Im willing to accept that they are perfectly fine as external drives that arent being constantly accessed. The Green is in mega power saving mode and loves to spin down, which means youre looking at longer access times and more wear and tear if you leave it plugged in and access it frequently. I wanted to punch my monitor every time I waited the magical 5 minutes (or whatever it is) before clicking on what I needed, just to wait several seconds on the drive to spin back up. I dont currently use NAS or RAID but considering my options this seemed like my best bet for frequently accessed mass storage, and I was at one point considering RAID (still am kind of). Black is better, faster, and as such costs more, but I couldnt justify it since I have an SSD for things that need to be fast. I bought this 4TB Red to put in my computer and replace a 3TB Green external drive I was using. Ive had it since August of 2014 which isnt that long at this point but its given me zero reason to complain, same as the 3TB Red I bought in October to replace a 1TB Blue. The only thing Ive noticed that was cause for concern at first is these things seem to be a little louder than your standard WD Blue or Green drive on read and write operations, and I thought I may have gotten one with a defect. Im not sure why that is, but I was much less concerned about it when I got the second drive and it sounded about the same. They seem to have quietened down some with use, and again they have given me no issues whatsoever. Ill definitely be buying more of these when the time comes. UPDATE 6/30/2015 Just wanted to say I am still running a 4tb and a 3tb WD Red in my computer and theyve been absolutely trouble free. One of them seems to make a short quiet buzzing noise every now and then that sounds out of place if youre used to diagnosing bad drives by sound like Ive had to do on many occasions, but every test Ive run comes up clean and Ive had no issues whatsoever out of either drive. Chkdsk, SMART, and benchmarks are clean and consistent and I use these daily as secondary drives for all my storage and most of my games. I really cant recommend these highly enough. That being said, I always feel the need to tell people KEEP BACKUPS. Any drive can fail and its always painful when it happens if you dont have regular backups. Its not cheap to match storage space for backups but trust me... That one day you need it -- and you will one day or one year unless you replace your drives regularly -- its money well spent.

Ive read a lot about these drives and how reliable they are, so I decided to try them for a change from normal/regular WD drives. I am used to WD green drives, which I use 24x7 (2x 500GB and 2x 2TB in RAID0) since 2010 without a single glitch (read/write some 10GB/day on average), the green drives are fantastic, and my SMART sensors still show very healthy indicators! I bought 4x3TB WD Red NAS to configure a RAID10 array, i need it for my massive music production samples collection (Kontakt 5 :-) ), sequential reading speed is crucial, so is redundancy, RAID10 is the key! Drives arrived a couple of days later than promised, its ok, things happen. I prepared everything right, done the backups, managed my ATX tower internal cables and controller ports to accomodate the 4 extra drives. plugged the drives, powered the system, and POOOOFFFFF, one of the drives is a Dead On Arrival!!!!! it just clicks and clicks and keep on clicking!!!! what a disaster! I mean to me its 4 brand new drives with one failing already, so 25% defect rate!!!! I contacted Amazon, they were very kind offered a replacement that arrives within 2 weeks as i live abroad, more wasted time, and i have to ship on my expense the defective product! too bad! I will wait for the replacement drive and update my review accordingly, i give 1 star due to already proven product reliability and RMA policy. Update: I should mention that Amazon customer were very kind and offered to me full refund for shipping the defective product back to the USA. The replacement drive arrived right on time, working great, I am increasing my rating from 1 star to 3 stars due to Amazon and WD great customer support. drives are in use since 6 months, all looks goods, cool drives, low temperature (27-35 Celsius) in the ventilated RAID cage. RAID10 on software IntelP55 SATA2 (3.0GT/s) using windows 10 x64: Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 253.285 MB/s Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 91.257 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 15.873 MB/s [ 3875.2 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2.962 MB/s [ 723.1 IOPS] Sequential Read (T= 1) : 135.242 MB/s Sequential Write (T= 1) : 59.555 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 2.449 MB/s [ 597.9 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.442 MB/s [ 107.9 IOPS] Test : 100 MiB [E: 50.9% (1804.0/3540.9 GiB)] (x3) [Interval=5 sec]

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

I ordered two of the 4 TB WD Red drives to replace 2 2TB WD Green drives in a Synology DS-211J. They arrived with a born-on date of September 2014 and NASWARE 3.0 markings. They were made in Thailand. Drives arrived in decent (not great) packaging--Amazon had the sense to put the two smaller cardboard boxes holding the drives (with plastic wings/collars holding the drives in place) in a larger box with air pillows top and bottom and around the inside edges of the larger box. First drive went into the Synology and a full extended S.M.A.R.T. test was run. This took roughly 8 hours. It passed. A disk group/volume repaid/rebuild was initiated. The volume took around 6 hours to rebuild one side of a RAID 1 mirror onto this drive. The drive was at least as quiet, if not moreso, than the WD Green it replaced, its transfer rate was slightly faster, and it held temps roughly 2 degrees F cooler than the Green did under load (eg, the RAID rebuild). The second green was removed, and the second Red put in the array. A full smart test was initiated. Roughly 3 hours in, the 2nd Red drive started to make sick-sounding clicks and snaps and the drive would spin down, and then start up again. This continued for 10 minutes and the S.M.A.R.T. test failed. A second S.M.A.R.T. extended test was initiated. The drive clicked/snapped/spun down/spun up and kicked out of the test about 15 minutes later. Red came out for return/replacement to Amazon, Green went back in for the 2nd disk in the array and rebuilt in roughly 7 hours. Now, given a choice, I prefer infant mortality in drives because it allows for a return to the retailer and not an RMA process with the manufacturer. However, its slightly disconcerting that one has to bother to run a full test of a drive prior to putting it to use. Moreover, Im really glad it went before I rebuilt the 2nd half of the mirror on it and expanded the logical volume--I would not be able to fall back to one of the 2TB drives and be up somewhat of a creek if a replacement did not beat another failure to my door. Its worth noting that both Red drives arrived with their LCC timer set to 138 seconds. While this is better than the WD Greens used to be, WD supposedly fixed these to not unload the heads constantly. Fortunately, the Synology units running DSM 4.3 (or thereabouts) and later have the necessary WDIDLE utility built in to adjust the LCC timer to 0, which essentially disables head parking. This does take a reboot to accomplish. Amazon should be given kudos for the ease of initiating a return and printing out the prepackaged UPS label to return the defective drive--took 90 seconds. Amazon should be ashamed of the fact that they were prepared to send the replacement via slow shipping even though Im Prime and the originally purchased drives were overnighted. This was also fixable--I went in to the order to adjust shipping speed and set it to two-days, but its the principle of the thing--it shouldve been like that from the creation of the replacement/return order. Pros: Quiet. Low energy utilization. Cool. Slightly faster than a comparable WD Green in a low power (electricity and CPU) NAS. Cons: 1 of 2 DOA. LCC timers not properly set/disabled from the factory. Amazon trying to be thrifty with the replacement shipping. Thoughts: given a DOA and the lack of significant speed differences and the LCC timers being just as screwed up from the factory as a Green, Im wondering if there is anything beyond the extra warranty to merit moving from WD Green to WD Red. TLER. Maybe. Im going with three stars. DOAs happen and Amazons packaging, while not the best, is still not as poor as say, Newegg. I will revisit the review at some point once I have the replacements and the drives have been in service for a fashion.

Product met the sellers description