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 use this in my custom built PC for storing large file and backups of videos/photos/etc and it has served me well. I have only filled up 1.97 TB of it and still have quite a lot of room left to store on it which is a huge plus as I plan on using it for a VERY long time. Be aware that this is not a hard drive meant for games or applications that need to read or write to the hard drive very quickly. This HDD spins at 5400 RPM which is about 2000 RPM short of regular consumer drives that can handle those applications/games much better. This is a large storage drive meant to store things in a large storage environment. That being said, I am a little let down by one of the features. This drive will automatically power-off (spin down) after a certain amount of idle. This means that if you want to access files on the drive, you will need to wait for it to spin back up. Dont get me wrong, it is no more than ~5 seconds, but that can be bad for hard drives as constantly spinning back up is not good for the disks or head. I would still recommend this drive to anyone that needs a large amount of storage on a reliable disk. Seagate just doesnt cut it and their price-to-performance ratio proves it. WD is the only brand I trust for hard drives.

This review is for Western Digital Red 4TB WD40EFRX (64mb cache) and not the newer version WD40EFAX (256mb cache). At the time of purchase, the newer version is the same price as this version but I chose this version as I suspect that the newer version is built with SMR, which would take heavy penalty eventually as my usage involves frequent writing and rewriting of data. For more info, google: 1. “PMR vs SMR” 2. “Western Digital admits 2TB-6TB WD Red NAS drives use shingled magnetic recording” I have purchased two of these for Synology DS218+ NAS and so far they are performing well in Synology Hybrid RAID configuration. Both drives clear the initial S.M.A.R.T. extended test. In terms of write speed, they consistently get 100MB/s to 120MB/s over my gigabit network. They are quiet and the temperature is never in the alarming range. According to the label, these are made in Thailand and they were only a month old from the date of purchase. I had a few Western Digital Green drives that have lasted for over eight years and counting. I hope these Reds will last the same. Since I have these for only a short while, I have yet completely fill up the drive or have the need for a RAID rebuild so I cannot attest their durability or if they are in fact PMR. I will update this review upon the one year mark.

I ordered 3 of these back in October of last year to use in my HTPC. Recently I was running out of space and ordered another one along with 3 - 4TB Greens for a backup solution. Upon reading up about the greens, which I had never ordered before, I learned about WDs WDIDLE3 utility that some people are using to set the Head Park timer from 8 seconds to 5 minutes and thus reducing the amount of times the heads park. Since the Greens are only rated at 300k cycles, you could see how quickly those would add up of they are parking every 8 seconds after use. On a whim, I decided to check the new Red drive I just purchased to see what its timer was set to, it was 5 minutes. I then checked the Red drives I purchased here from Amazon back in October of last year, the same 4TB model as the one I just ordered. To my surprise, all 3 were set to 8 seconds and my head park count was already at 18k in a matter of months. I used the utility and set those to 5 minutes as well. Performance of the drive was not really what I bought them for, but they seem to be fine. Their not Black drives and 7200 RPMs, so their not as quick as what I have in my gaming machine, but they work just fine for my HTPC.

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.

Ordered 4 of these to make a RAID10 array to hold my iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie libraries. I had those libraries on a single Lacie external HDD via Thunderbolt and that failed right after the 3 year warranty expired. That wasnt catastrophic because I have multiple backups, but this gave me the excuse to use a RAID10 setup. I wanted the RAID10 for 2 reasons: 1. Ease of failure recovery 2. increased speed. Looked at a lot of drives and the WD Reds seemed to fit the bill. I also ordered an OWC Thunderbay 4 RAID Thunderbolt 2 enclosure to put them in. Nice combo. The speed of these drives seems right in line with what I expected. Heres what I measured with Blackmagic on my 2011 iMac through a TB cable: Single drive: 146 Mbps RAID0 x 4 drives: 560 Mbps (that was cool) RAID1 x 2 drives: 141 Mbps RAID10 x 4 drives: 286 Mbps That all seems to line up with expectations. There are probably faster single drives out there that push closer to 165+ Mbps, but this works for what I need. If I really want more speed Ill just put 4 SDDs in there and let er rip @ 1 Gbps. What made me giggle is that the internal drive on my iMac runs at 96 Mbps, so my external RAID10 is faster than the internal drive. I guess they made slower drives way back in 2011. Hope they hold up well but if they dont I wont have any down time.

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.

Excellent Drives. Ive been running a variety of WD Red, Green, and Seagate Archive Drives for the better part of several years, and I thought that I would share some useful advice for things to watch out for when buying new drives, and detecting infant mortality. First thing to look for is to observe the packaging the drive arrives in. It is industry practice to ship one or more drives in boxes that are made to perfectly fit the drive. Inside the box, the drive should be suspended with two plastic holders. These holders suspend the drive and dampen any drops the package may experience during transit. (Bulk orders (15+) may be shipped in a single larger box with foam cut-out arrays). Secondly, when installing the drives, make sure that your hands are clean. Give them a wash, or better yet, wear gloves. Avoid transferring finger/hand oil to the drives so that hot-spots arent created. Thirdly, once the drives are installed, give them a full, long format. You can run 1, 3, 5, (or even more) passes on the disks. This ensures that every single sector of the drives gets written to. Once the format is complete, look up the SMART data, and check the values for anything alarming. If a drive suffered damage in shipping, now is when it may be noticeable. Compare the values to your other drives. Start-up times, head parks and so fourth may vary slightly so theres nothing to be worried about a little deviation there, but pay attention to failed reads, reallocated sectors, and RUEs. Granted, all of this advice should be taken with a grain of salt since SMART values are not the silver bullet to predict drive failure, but this testing should be a good indicator on whether or not a drive is ready for production use. Above all else, remember that backups are your friend.

These drives (10 in total) were purchased to complete the installation of two Digital Robotics (Drobo) 5N Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. When I purchased my first Drobo 5N from Amazon several years ago the best Western Digital hard drive that was available was the EADS Green drives. However, technical support representatives from both Digital Robotics and Western Digital agreed that the EADS drives were not designed (or the correct) drive for NAS installations. Fortunately, subsequent to my initial purchase of five EADS drives Western Digital technology has continued to advance and the RED technology drives are now available. From the Western Digital website: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=810 NASware grows to 3.0 Built off of our determination to deliver the best NAS experience, NASware 3.0 extends our promise by further optimizing WD Red for the NAS environment with added support for 6 to 8 NAS bays. WD Red now supports small NAS systems from 1 to 8 bays thanks to NASware 3.0, which further improves drive compatibility and reliability. At 48 TB of total capacity in an 8 bay system, WD Red expands your NAS experience. and Professional solutions Designed specifically with SMB customers in mind, the WD Red family has expanded with the addition of WD Red Pro, which is available for the 8 to 16 bay medium to large-scale NAS environments. With capacities up to 4 TB, WD Red Pro carries a 5-year limited warranty and was engineered to handle the increased workloads from your business. A word of caution based on my actual experience. Regardless of the cost savings, purchase these drives directly from Amazon whose Customer Service is exceptional. I purchased another drive from one of the third party vendors. The vendor had listed it as a New drive. When I attempted to register it with WD I was informed that the three-year warranty had expired 18 months previously. The vendor had neglected to update the Amazon website and the drive itself, while still fresh on the vendor warehouse shelf, had been there for almost five years.

Bought this drive because I leave my computer on 24/7. So far, it is very quiet and runs as cool as my Samsung and Hitachi drives. It took less than a couple of minutes using Windows Disk feature from Administrative Tools to format and partition the drive. Since I installed it, It has been working very well without any noticeable sounds or heat issues. I was concerned about buying the other Western Digital or Seagate Hard drives due to all the negative reviews from other customers. I bought the Red Hard drive because it is made to run for long extended period of time. As of today, I am very happy with the drive. Amazon.com packed it very well which kept it from being DOA when I received it. Update: 01/07/2013 Since installing this NAS hard drive in my tower, when you boot up to restore a system image from another hard drive in your computer case, it wont recognize it. It only recognizes the NAS drive. I needed to put my system Image backup on my NAS drive to be able to be recognized during boot up or repair function of Windows 7 or 8. If you have a network, then it wont be a problem but if you dont, be aware that, at least on my computer, it will only recognize the NAS drive during boot up when it comes to restoring your backup. The NAS drive has an embedded program so that it can be used in a Network type of computer configuration but looks like it isnt meant to be installed in a Non-Networked Computer case. Update: July 2017 - This hard drive has been working 24/7/365 days since I installed it in 2012. Absolutely no problems up to now. I did have the above mentioned issues, but with Windows 10 Pro it is a NON-ISSUE about restoring your Window Backup Image from this drive. It is recognized and works perfectly. I am very happy that it has lasted for over five years without any problems. Most Hard drives usually give up the ghost in less time than this drive. I definitely will repurchase another RED WD drive for backup purposes in the future.

I purchased this from Amazon Warehouse in Used-Acceptable condition. Running an initial S.M.A.R.T. test revealed 0 Bad Sectors, however, the drive did have a drive reconnection count of 13. While 13 for this metric is not good, I monitor it weekly, and no new drive reconnects have occurred. As the drive had a relatively low 400 hrs when I received it, I was ok keeping the drive, given the 30% discount from full price. I recommend buying WD Red drives from Amazon Warehouse when the discounts are warrant it. I think these are a great value. Make sure to research the spin RPMs and whether the drive is CMR or SMR. Many of the WD Red drives may be advertised as 5400 RPM Class, but they actually run at 7200 RPM. Lastly, avoid any SMR drives altogether.