HGST Deskstar NAS 3.5-Inch 4TB 7200RPM SATA III 64MB Cache Internal Hard Drive Kit (0S03664)

I purchased this drive last year when it was $156, before WD took over HGST and released a pitiful excuse for a HDD in place of this one, causing the price of this original drive to skyrocket to $216. I made the mistake of not ordering enough of these in the first place. They're quiet, fast, run cool and are reliable.The replacement drive that WD has released in place of it is a loud, crunchy sounding mess of a HDD that makes any chassis you put it in sound like a giant metal drum, and has a much higher failure rate. Leave it up to WD to ruin a company with a great record for releasing very well made, reliable mechanical drives. Shame on you, Western Digital. I think you bought HGST because their drives were leaving yours in the dust in terms of reliability. Snakes.

After spending much time reading reviews on NAS drive such as the WD red and Seagate NAS, I pulled the trigger and bought 2 of the HGST NAS 4T drives. They arrived separately from different locations. The first drive was installed into my Synology NAS and the SHR raid volume was repaired without incident. The second drive arrived a day later and was installed into the system. On startup, the drive sounded like it had rocks in it. Lots of clicking unlike the previously installed HGST. After ten minutes, SMART showed failed and after a few more minutes, the NAS failed to even recognize the drive was even present. Had one heck of a time to restore my volume to a previous good but managed to get it done. I reordered the drive and got a return from Amazon (great company BTW). These drives have the best reviews and the lowest failure rates when compared to other comparable drives on the market. Apparently even here, there will be a bad one out of the box. I will get another and try again.On edit: The replacement drive arrived within two days! It functions perfecty!

Just what I was looking for, reliability. Obviously a 3-year warranty is a good indicator. The Deskstar NAS is a new product. It has the 1M MTBF vs. the regular Deskstar 7k4000 (HDS724040ALE640) which has a 0.8M MTBF. The NAS version also has a rotational stability sensor to help monitor the smart status better. I was looking for additional external storage for backups & videos. I installed 4 of these in an 4-bay external USB 3.0 enclosure (Dyconn Quartz 4). For around $1100 total installed cost, you can get nice 16Tb setup for all your "stuff". I've got mine connected to a MacMini. A good (non-SSD) 3.5" drive has about the same read/write speed as USB 3.0, thus in an external USB 3.0 setup, it will give you ~170-180 MB/s regardless of RAID setup.Update #1I was able to test drive speed vs various other drives. This drive performs as expected. I did not test in a RAID configuration. (sorry about the formatting, the last two nos. in each row are Read/Write in MB/s), all tests with BlackMagicMid--2011 Mac MiniWD My Book Studio 4Tb, RAID 0 Firewire 800 800 megabit FW800 60 64Apple 5400 rpm 750 Gb HD SATA III 6 gigabit SATA III 68 68Toshiba/Apple 5400 500 Gb Laptop drive SATA III 3 gigabit Thunderbolt 63 63Crucial M4 - 256 Gb SATA III 5 gigabit Thunderbolt 382 79HGST 4 Tb NAS 3.5" Drive SATA III 6 gigabit Thunderbolt 163 160 (Seagate BackupPlus thunderbolt adapter)2012 Mac Mini ServerSamsung 840 SSD - 500 Gb SATA III 6 gigabit SATA III 560 320Samsung 840 SSD - 500 Gb x 2 - RAID 0 SATA III 6 gigabit SATA III 990 620Patriot Magnum 64 Gb USB 3.0 Memory Stick USB 3.0 4.8 gigabit USB 3.0 242 120Transcend 64 Gb USB 3.0 ?? Memory Stick USB 3.0 4.8 gigabit USB 3.0 15 15HGST 4 Tb NAS 3.5" Drive SATA III 6 gigabit USB 3.0 131 126 (Dyconn Quartz 4, JOBD)HGST 4 Tb NAS 3.5" Drive SATA III 6 gigabit USB 3.0 163 160 (Anker Uspeed adapter)Update #2; I just tested four of these drives in RAID5 mode on the 4-bay USB 3.0 Dyconn.... way better than expected 250 Mb/s Read, 241 Write. Woo Hoo! So, double the single drive mode.Update #3 (April 2015): I bought a 5th HGST NAS, 4Tb! I needed a drive for another computer and decided to try a cheap SATA to USB adapter (Sabrent Flat Docking Station) , I gets virtually identical performance as above, 162 Mb/s Read, 160 Mb/s Write. Sweet! for <$200 I've got a nice external with a reliable drive. Perfect for Time Machine backups. AND, If I do loose a RAID5 drive, I've got a backup! :)I may buy 2 more 6 Tb units and RAID 0 the in a 2-Drive dock (software RAID in OS X) to use for video editing. I should get 250 Mb/s that way.

For a couple of years, my home storage system has been provided by two 2TB FireWire units, one from Seagate and one from Western Digital. They handle my music and video libraries, plus a collection of big virtual machine images that I run on VirtualBox for software development projects. In addition, all of the laptops and tablets in the house are backed up using Time Machine, and the whole thing is further backed up to the cloud (using the Backblaze service).So a few weeks ago I started noticing performance glitches and log messages about recoverable disk errors, which I traced to the Seagate unit. My preference is to deal with soft errors before they become hard, so I investigated my options. The best solution that I could come up with was a Mobius two-bay enclosure, together with a pair of 4TB HGST Deskstar drives. So that's what I got.Performance and reliability have been excellent. The noise is a little higher than the Seagate unit which it replaced, but it's within acceptable limits. The only issue I'm encountering is that sometimes (but not always, just to complicate things), when I reboot my iMac, the Mobius drives aren't mounted. This confuses iTunes and other software. The fix is easy - I just power cycle the enclosure, then restart the apps - but it's annoying. It also disrupts other operations, because when I set up the Firewire chain, I put the Mobius in the middle (between the iMac and the WD unit) rather than at the end. At some point I'll probably reconfigure it.