Western Digital 16TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5 - WD161KFGX

First things first. This 2TB Red Pro drive is CMR (not SMR) technology, which is a relief. In any event, I installed these drives (2 of them) in my quite old, Synology DS211 NAS and thus far have had no issues at all. Pretty happy with them. I havent done any performance testing and this is just an occasional use device, largely for archival storage. I did upgrade to Synology DSM 6.2, no problems there either. All the drive features seem to work including sleep mode and S.M.A.R.T and other drive management technologies. Im mostly happy these drives were not SMR, that was my biggest concern. As far as noise, when these drives are spinning they are pretty darn quiet... literally cant hear them at less than 3 feet from my head. They do make some interesting noises when going into sleep/wake mode however.. very bizarre sounds. Vibration seems non-existent as well. I did have some older WD drives in this NAS for almost 8 years and they seemed to occasionally have some harmonics, these new Red Pro 2TB drives dont seem to have that issue at all. Good luck!

I have a home lab with a NAS thats central for most things running. Last fall I realized the old disks were passing 8 years of total run time (and less than 50 Power On cycles) and not only were the old drives showing their age as in lacking good cache but I figured it wouldnt be too far off into the future before the drives would fail, so I started to replace the drives. Same housing, same hardware (Except for the disk) same software - once data was migrated over, nobody would be able to tell the difference except the newer disks were faster. And I was pretty happy - that is until last week. This disk was D-E-A-D - a ton of read errors, and no way to even send a command to the drive. I removed the drive and started testing it, to look at SMART data finding a looong list of errors (192) and a Raw Read Error Rate sky high (almost 500K). The log is showing failures even at PowerOn - its as if the drive is having a hard time talking back to the controller. The drive gets EXTREMELY hot being powered on for just a few minutes. So this is going the way of RMAs once WD gets back to me. Had I written this review a month ago it would be full 5 stars and never had a problem kind of review. Having replaced 4 drives with a very long run time without major issues this is a bummer. It happens - sometimes a drive is just bad, except in this case WD added to my frustration with a web-site that would not initiate an RMA for me.

you can count on them in your NAS.

I purchased the 4T version for home PC with a windows operating system. I need this particular HDD because it is listed 7200RPM. I didnt meet any challenge when I installed other WD hard drives. It involved only a few clicks when I switched from WD 1T to 2T months ago, for example. I simply inserted the new disk into a USB case and cloned the entire disk in Minitool participation and got the job done. I was not lucky with this disk. It gave me so much trouble and wasted my two days to figure this out. First, sector size was different from my old 2t WD Blue drive thus I couldnt clone it directly. Because the target drive was not the main OS drive so I decided to simply copy all the folders into the new HDD and switch the two. Then I used Minitool to format it. It refused the command, software reported error. I then tried all other software including the one recommended on WD website (Acronis True Image for Western Digital). I finally got it done by using EaseUS. I formatted it and copied all folders from the old disk and switched it with the old internal disk. When I opened windows, none of the partitions created in EaseUS showed up. HDD showed up in BIOS menu so I knew it was there. I googled answer to this problem, read all articles to educate myself. Checked Manage disk in OS and realized one of the partitions was listed as GPT protective partition. I then followed the article published on Seagate website (ironic) and cleaned the entire disk using diskpat command. All data were removed. I returned to day 1. If your partition software doesnt work in Windows, check whether this disk is GPT protective in disk management. Dont repeat my mistake. I am glad I didnt do anything harmful to the old drive thus I spent the second day repeating what I did before, copy and paste. Now the new drive works and it works faster than old WD blue 2T. It is quite noisy but not scary. I am satisfied with the product so far but I hope WD can improve the product to meet various needs from customers. I am not a tech guy but switching HDD shouldnt be so difficult and time-consuming, thus I removed one star (should have been two stars when I felt frustrated yesterday).

I have used this line of drives for a long time and normally they just work. this one was dead on arrival. it would power up and you would hear that dreaded rhythmic seeking sound of a bad drive. once in a while computer would see it but it would error on any operation you attempted on the drive. Returned for refund. Ordered new one. hopefully second time is the ticket.

Bought two of these for a mirrored data partition setup in a server. Within maybe 15 minutes they were running noticeably warm and within an hour they were both running hot enough that it was painful to try to keep your hand up against the side of them for more than maybe 10-15 seconds. Shipped and sold by Amazon btw - just cause others had mentioned issues with drives sold by third party sellers. My only other experience with Western Digital 10TB drives was with an external drive (not sure if it was a red drive inside it but....) that failed a little under a year so Im not optimistic about these but they were what was available when we needed them. 4 stars because even though theyre working now, I think that at some point were going to have to swap these drives out even if they dont fail just because of the fact that the whole rig is running that much hotter because of these little branding irons. Thats going to be a pain and take hours of downtime to transfer the data - all of which I wouldnt have to deal with if these ran cooler like they shouldve out of the box. Not sure if they just arent made to handle RAID 1. Ill update the review when/if something fails. Fingers crossed.

These took under a minute each to install into my Synology DS920+ NAS. Since it was all new gear, I let it do a through drive check as part of initializing which took a long time. I think it may ave been about two days. In theory, I could have used it during this time, but I just started it and ignored it. During installation, the 920 whines about any accessories (memory, drives) that arent Synologys own and that included these. On the 922, they change from whining to much more obnoxious contrived incompatibilities, but this combination was chosen because exactly once, during insteallation, it warns you that its not a supported combination and thats that. Probably if there were a support issue involving data loss, theyd remind you of that oath you took to not complain, but in reality this is a very common combination that works quite well. Fan and normal noise is quite minimal. There was a noticeable clunk during a head seek. I reduced this by offlining the unit so I could remove power then applying the fuzzy half of a hook-and-loop fastener to the bottom of the bottom rail. That gave it support and a little bit of padding so the metal cage didnt serve as a drum skin for the oh-so-tiny motion that got amplified when transferred to the sheet metal. Im looking forward to getting many, many years from these drives, like I did from the 4TB WD these are replacing. Those drives have no reading errors. Size grows and no drives are infallible, so I opted to replace them on my schedule (OK, and on Amazon Day special. :-) ) instead of letting the drive pick its own replacement day, taking my data with it.

I bought it for my NAS. Great service, easy to install and works well!

Bought the 18 TB variant, definitely not the best packaging for a $400 hard drive. The drive works but I hate the occasional loud clicking noise from head parking or some advanced power management (APM) feature that I couldn’t disable. APM resets minutes later after I disable it. I tried several disk management softwares with no luck. It must be the firmware. Why put APM on a NAS drive that is meant to run 24/7??

I use a Synology Nas you can put these drives right in easy I have multiple of them that Ive been running for years flawlessly the only reason I change them out is now Im going from 4 terabyte to 10tb itll be nice to see him get a little cheaper down the road when the twenties come out but they are a solid product thank you WD