Western Digital 8TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5 - WD80EFBX

This WD Red Plus 8TB HDD (bought used-acceptable from Amazon Warehouse) is fine, although it seems to run hotter than other WD Red drives; it is within range at 100-104 (F). However, all 7 of my other WD Red Plus drives all run at about 90-100 (F). I have purchased 4 new WD Red hard drives on Amazon, and another 4 used from Amazon Warehouse. All were 12-14TB, except for one 8TB HDD. The drives all live in Synology desktop NAS boxes. No issues with the new drives. But, I will probably be returning one 14TB HDD, bc it had 5500+ hours on it. While this is within Amazon Warehouse terms, there was no need to keep it, as the other used drives had only 50, 300, & 400 hrs on them. No drives had bad sectors (although one drive had 15 failed reconnect attempts; reconnects are not good, but I kept it bc the reconnects have not occurred during my ownership). I am a happy with the WD Red drives, just make sure not to get the SMR drives, which WD is guilty as charged. The used drives from Amazon Warehouse are a really great purchase.

So far the drives have been find. Time will tell if they are reliable for years.

WD Red HDD are great, this was not an issue with the product itself, but packaging and shipping ! This HDD drive was sent just in the shielding envelope and an Amazon bag. It had obvious signs of impact on all the corners including holes in the shielding envelope. I did not even open to install: everyone with IT background knows you do not throw HDDs around, it needed the original box with end padding and bubble wrap ! I ordered a replacement.

Great drive so far. I didnt realize this NAS Plus drive runs at 7200 rpm. It may be slightly louder than the 5400 rpm drives but if it is its not very noticeable unless youre right next to the PC. Transfer rate drive to drive and over the network is great. After transferring large files over a few hours the temperature range stayed between 90 degrees F at idle to 110 degrees F (after moving 2TB of video). Im using this drive in a standard HTPC enclosure without any extra cooling fans with an intel 775 motherboard, quad core CPU running Linux. More details for nerds: I was planning on setting this up in a separate NAS box but decided instead to just add this drive to the HTPC and set up a shared network folder on it. Works great. If you are looking for NAS storage plus an HTPC, I would suggest that you only one device, the HTPC. Boot it from a small SSD with a second large NAS hard drive configured in the fstab file with a mount point in a network share folder. Linux allows you to set a mount point for any size partition as a virtual file system within a shared folder on the boot drive. Note that the partition will only auto mount when specified in the fstab file and it would only be shareable if mounted in a folder on the boot drive due to OS file security.

I purchased this drive to add as a second drive to a NAS enclosure to run a RAID 1 configuration for redundancy. Setup couldnt have been easier: I opened the case, slid in the drive, and it was instantly recognized. For the price, you cant beat it. There was a time that a 200MB drive would have cost more than this. I went with this WD Red Plus drive because Ive been using them for years and theyve been extremely reliable. I have two other NAS devices using pairs of Red drives, the oldest has been running flawlessly since 2012, and the other since 2015. Reliability is important, and I have been able to trust these drives.

I took the wrong direction recently and tried a 8TB Seagate Barracuda first... mistake... Lasted less than 24 hours.... Sure it was cheaper.... just goes to show.... So went back to WD Red Drives which Ive always found excellent. Bought the 8TB Red Pro and installed in a Rosewill USB enclosure with fan and temp control (bought from Amazon also). Perfect match. The WD Red Pro is a CMR. I was stunned to see that WD is now supplying Red drives (not Pro models) which are SMR. All my old Red drives are CMR so I will only buy Pro drives moving forward now I know. Red Pro drive is excellent. My NAS and Media Center are full of the CMRs and Im impressed with their performance and longevity.