Western Digital 4TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" -WD40EFPX

I've bought a number of these Red Plus and Red Pro drives. One of them failed on September 30. It took until October 21 to get an RMA and shipping label from Western Digital.The drive was received back by WD on October 24, but after ten days they still had not officially received it and I had to send them proof of delivery.They officially acknowledged receipt on November 6. Today, November 11, they have not started a replacement shipping order. I called to ask what was happening and was eventually told that in a day or so a shipping order will be raised, and then in another day or two, a disk will be sent out. So, maybe sometime next week it will arrive, making it a month and a half from requesting an RMA to getting a replacement.I don't know about you, but I've a degraded RAID in a NAS while waiting for this replacement drive. This will be six weeks or more from start to finish, and I've had to go through multiple frustrating calls with support people to drive it forward at every step. Totally unsatisfactory.I'm not so much blaming WD for the drive failing; these things sometimes happen. But for sure, their RMA/exchange process is appalling, and the funniest part was having their support rep, in of course an Indian accent, explain about their desire to provide excellent service. Six weeks to replace a failed drive is not excellent.

Not much is needed to explain, a drive is a drive. This one is very well priced, silent, reliable, and integrates into my Synology Ds224 with ease. Running two 8TBs in Raid 1 and very happy.

We use WD Red drives for our NAS servers. They work perfectly out of the box, install easily, and have had limited issues with them. After years of 24/7 running youMay get some errors on one but if you keep a RAID config it’s easy to replace/recover.Overall, very dependable and good price.

Update: Below is the "usual RMA process" which is referenced throughout this rant.**Following case creation I followed up for 4 days until someone looked at it, created the RMA and (in an unsual positive move) created a ups return label for the drive. I shipped it off for the month long turnaround time.***** new fast process - contact person in their chat customer service department with the following information:original invoice pdfdate of failure, type of failureSerial number of drive to be RMA'dshipping addressSuggestion: register the drive for warranty service using the original invoice and received date prior to contacting them, it saves them doing it themselves and may speed things up a bit.I have purchased 4 drives in January of 2023. I am writing this in July 2023. I have had 7 drives fail so far. (Aug 2024)I am not impressed with the urgency shown by their warranty department.Update, its November 2023 and I have experienced 5 drive failures out of the 4 drives.Warranty department has "lost" two drives so far, somewhere within their warehouse, delaying shipment for several days, and in one case (where I had paid for expedited service) shipment was delayed a week while they investigated.UPDATE: Jan 2 2024.I'm running a QNAP NAS. In No 2023 I had a "normal" drive failure of the "oldest" drive and began the RMA process. As usual, the RMA interface failed and I had to create a case to have them begin the RMA process. See Above.Then, I had another hard drive failure. My RAID-5 was now destroyed along with all my data that I had put on to the system so far. This was 4 years of business photos and video, business records and more.That day I purchased a Toshiba HD which arrived the next day, and QNAP spent a MONTH (being awesome and ) trying to help me recover my data. Eventually they got enough back to copy off the array (and back on to the 10 year old WD drive enclosure I was using beforehand) so I could rebuild the drive when the 4th disk arrived from WD.The 5th replacement disk arrives this Friday after shipping it in Early December. (all that diagnostic time took a toll on shipping).Today, I had another hard drive failure. I'm up to 6 drive replacements. I originally purchased 4 drives, which means I've replaced two of the replacement drives. In less than a year.I've changed from Raid-5 to Raid 6, meaning I've sacrificed 2 of the 4 hard drives for backup of the other two now, resulting in what was a 50 TB raid storage becoming 35TB raid storage.Very disheartening.edit Aug 7, 2024.Since January I've only had 2 hard drive failures - the first in July and the second today. The RMA process continues to be entirely broken.Normal service turnaround time is 35 days from manual forced creation of RMA by chat service agents to receipt of replacement hard drive.This can be sped up by tracking the shipments and reaching out to the chat agents during their normal business hours to allow them to see that their warehouse takes 6 business days to in-process an rma and 5 business days to out-process an rma. Basically, track the shipment in to the warehouse, give the chat agents the tracking information, they will make you wait while they presumably call someone to see if its a hard drive or a brick in the box, and then they will trigger the next step in the process. "Agents are available only between: Monday - Friday 0800 - 1900 PST and Saturday - Sunday 0800 - 1700 PST".

Very pleased with these drives.I am running these in an XFS raidz configuration. They are nearly silent, but make a little noise when seeking and a distintive clunk on power off. Transfer rate is 250 MB/s on the outer tracks.So far so good. The drive gets excellent ratings, and the warranty is excellent.

My level with servers is that of an absolute amateur. I don't need instantaneous speed, high uptime, or needing to handle high loads during a peak time. I use my NAS as a repository to stream movies on plex occasionally, store home photos and videos, and back up phone data across my family.While I cannot speak for those with more nuanced intricacies, I can highly recommend this for those at my level - to those who dabble in storing family data. The high storage capacity is perfect for RAID arrays, which has already helped once when an older drive failed due to other hardware difficulties. The rebuild was flawless. In addition, even when bulk information goes through the drives, the drives are never that loud. It's great for home use and is barely even noticeable.5/5 for surviving consistent uptime, good data storage for the price, and being low volume.

This drive worked perfectly upon installation and I've had no problems with it in over 2 weeks. I'm using it for Time Machine backups via an external disk attachment on a 7 year old Mac. Time Machine runs about once an hour. However, I noticed that some reviewers are complaining about the noise on this drive and I want to use my IT professional background to give some insight into what might be going on for them so that others can make an informed decision on this drive. I have the 2 TB drive.I don't personally find this drive to be loud and it's running in an external disk drive enclosure. It runs about once an hour for however long Time Machine needs to run. When the drive is in use, it does make some noise, but it can't be heard at all outside of the room it's in. I sleep in the room next to where it lives and both rooms are always open and I've never had this drive make enough noise to be heard beyond maybe 7 feet from it and it can barely be heard at that distance. So why are some people complaining rather bitterly about how loud this drive is?First of all, it's an old school mechanical drive. It will make some noise when in use. That is the nature of these drives. And the more you use them and the more filled up they get, the more likely they are to make some noise on use. It is also possible that some drives off the manufacturing line are better than others, some are worse, and some of the people who complain just by bad luck got a noisy one. I don't find the noise I'm hearing to be unusual for this type of drive. I've heard a lot worse. Also, if someone is going to use this drive with a lot of file deletions and additions, it's going to make more noise. My suggestion for people who are extremely noise sensitive is to consider paying more and using SSDs instead. They won't make any noise. This drive has worked exactly as I intended it to work and I would recommend it to others. Again, please note that this is a mechanical drive and its lifespan is expected to be much lower than that of an equivalent SSD. You should probably think about replacing it after 3-4 years whereas for a 2 TB SSD, ,in theory you could get decades of heavy use before it goes bad. That's why SSDs cost more.

I was all. excited to buy qty 2 of these. I got them and found out they will not work with my Synology NAS as it only accepts up to 20TB. So I went to my attached USB 2 drive Terramaster and sure enough it also only handles up to 20TB. From my research the 20TB is really a limit until a newer generation of home server or USB multi drive. unit comes out.. Buyer beware.. My Synology could handle one of them but not two in a raid..

Replace an SSD and a SATA drive with this one and I gotta say it's pretty good. I can't really say anything about noise since my office has a few systems with audible fans which I wouldn't say are loud but definitely not completely quiet. Transferring big files like zip or iso are really fast and big groups seems fast as well. Happy with the price and performance so far.Update... Was making a sound but I noticed it stopped when I held down my PC. So it seems like the drives rotates really fast and if parts in your case are just a little loose you will hear some noise. I opened up my case made sure everything around the drive was secured and so far no loud noise.

Some techies don't like these. I do for my Synology 4112 RAID Server.Not happy WD is pulling this Red PLUS nonsense, if you know, you know what I mean. Simply, the new basic Reds, look like the old better Reds, but are not. You want these, Red Plus, to replace the old ones.Had 3tb Reds before this - lasting over 11 years 24/7 - a lot or those years spent in up to 88 degrees in Vegas home with bad A/C, three of 4 were still running when I pulled the raid and upgraded to these 6gb drives (in a place with good A/C, phew).Tbh, I'm writing this review a year after buying 5 of them for my RAID server. They're doing great. Disc health is pretty much perfect still.