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 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.

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 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.

almost 3 years later(((2y, 5m, 15d, 11h))) its still doing ok using in a unraid box smart status 1 Raw read error rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always Never 0 3 Spin up time 0x0027 180 174 021 Pre-fail Always Never 4000 4 Start stop count 0x0032 097 097 000 Old age Always Never 3105 5 Reallocated sector count 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always Never 0 7 Seek error rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 0 9 Power on hours 0x0032 071 071 000 Old age Always Never 21587 (2y, 5m, 15d, 11h) 10 Spin retry count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old age Always Never 0 11 Calibration retry count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old age Always Never 0 12 Power cycle count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old age Always Never 26 192 Power-off retract count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 22 193 Load cycle count 0x0032 199 199 000 Old age Always Never 3082 194 Temperature celsius 0x0022 118 109 000 Old age Always Never 29 196 Reallocated event count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 0 197 Current pending sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 0 198 Offline uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old age Offline Never 0 199 UDMA CRC error count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 0 200 Multi zone error rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old age Offline Never 0

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!

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.

I replace my NAS drives every couple of years or so as it gets full, doubling the capacity each time. Prior to these 8TB drives I had a pair of 4TB WD reds, and before that a pair of 2TB WD greens and before that a pair of 1TB WD greens. These drives perform very well - on a par with the 4s I removed. But they make lots of strange noises, like intermittent soft buzzing, and occasional faint humming. They are noticeably noisier than the 4TB reds I replaced. But Ive been running them for almost 2 months without a hiccup. I have yet to lose a WD drive in this NAS over 7 years of 24x7 operation so I will stick with WD until that changes.

Update: 2016/10/10 - Amazon is accepting a return of the drives with the miss matching serial number. I bought the same drive advertised from Frys Electronics. My issue was unrelated to the drive itself. Im changing this to a 5 star because I am using the same type of drive without issue. WD tech support willing to help resolve my issue. For that I give my compliments to WD tech support. Update: 2016/10/01 - Im currently working with WD on this issue. I expect that Ill be changing this to a 5 star review in the near future. It turns out that the root of my problem was that both drives received were improperly packaged in the wrong box.The box had the correct SN and it did have the correct warranty for these drives. ___ Im giving this a 1 star because when I called W.D., they said both of my drives are OEM hard drives and that any RMA requests would have to go though the manufacture of the computer it was sold in. Im very confused by this because it the item isnt listed as OEM. If you buy one of these drives, register your device to verify it isnt an OEM drive. I bought a WD Red 3TB on 9/27/2016 (Received on 9/28) - Dead on Arrival - ASRock Motherboard bios wouldnt detect it. - ASUS Bios wouldnt detect it. (Used SATA cable / power that i used for a different drive) - Unraid 6 and Windows 64bit device manager wouldnt detect it. - External hard drive dock didnt work. - Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows didnt detect it (using SATA port). - Called WD support and they told me the drive is bad. That I can do an RMA or return to amazon. I returned to amazon for a replacement. Replacement arrived 9/29 - Dead on Arrival (This time it shows up in bios, but makes clicking sounds after spin up. I speculate the clicking sounds are made when the computer is attempting to access the drive.) - Booted into ASRock bios. The drive name did show up. (Details about the drive including smart were unknown) - In windows device manager it showed the drive as unknown and not initialized. I would expect that, so I attempted to initialize the disk. Windows gave me an unknown path error. I didnt expect it to work, because the drive was making clicking sounds. 9/29: I called WD support again, this time to discuss the second drive. I provided the Serial Number of both drives to WD and they said the drives are OEM. OEM drives are not covered under the WD warranty. That the two drives I had were sold to a manufacture. That I would have to go though the manufacture to get a replacement under that manufacturers warranty. Im rather confused at this point because this item is sold by Western Digital according to the Amazon product page. Ive saved the S/N of the drives in case WD responds to this post wanting them. Personal Opinion: I bought WD Red for my Unraid6 server to build out a NAS due to the higher levels of vibrations when next to other HDDs. I find it very odd to have two hard drives DOA. If I heard someone else saying that, i would speculate that they had a bad cable or didnt know how to set up a new hard drive in their PC. Based on the reviews of the drive, Im going to assume that this is more of an isolated case. I would of forgiven this product for the failures due to the many unknowns during shipping. The only thing I couldnt excuse and the reason for the 1 star was that the dive didnt have a warranty according to WD because it is an OEM drive. Note on shipping: The hard drive box is marked as fragile, but that is contained within a generic amazon box. So the fragile warnings are not visible when the item is shipped. This could explain why the hard drives were damaged. Update: 2016/01/10 - Im in the process of packaging the 2 HDs to return. Ive discovered that the S/N on the boxes do not match the drives they shipped with. WD has replied to my review. I will be calling them and updating the review after. Update: 2016/10/01 - Ive contacted both WD and Amazon about the issue. Amazon noted on my return that the SNs wont match.

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.

I purchased 2 of these for an MD MyCloud Ultra2EX NAS to substitute a Synology DS220 fitted with 2 Seagate Ironwolf drives that deleted a weeks worth of work without reason or warning. Given that I dont know if the problem was the Synology or the Ironwolf drives, I just substituted everything. I transferred all the files from the Synology/Ironwolf to the MyCloud/WD Red Plus and the response time side by side (connected to the same router and even plugged onto on the same power strip was noticeable faster with these WD Red Plus drives than the Ironwolf ones. Im sticking to WD...I have tried 4 different times to give other brands the chance to prove me wrong, but they fail every single time. This last fiasco will make me a WD devote for as long as they keep this quality ethic.