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 have been a long term western digital customer for over 10yrs. This drive is aimed and marketed at NAS type devices however also very good in a regular desktop computer system as a storage drive, which is how I am currently using it for my personal desktop system .I have owned this red drive for approx. 10 days now. The sustained transfer speed is very good. the lower / variable spindle speed compared to normal 7200RPM drives doesn't impact its performance for my use . It performs better then my 4TB WD green drive. My Red drive was installed in a computer with many hard drives and it runs at a cool 84F (29 C ) at idle, the lowest temp. drive in the computer. Also according to the Red drive spec sheet uses the least amount of power as well.Time limited error recovery (TLER) is one of the benefits for the Red drives , outlined in the youtube video podcast below.A popular weekly hardware video podcast with storage editor at PC Perspective ( pcper) Allyn Malventano addressing uses of red model drives:https://youtu.be/WjjCMWZ0aDU?t=51mI included a start time for later in the podcast @ 51 minutes, the start of discussion of WD red drives and its use in NAS and non NAS systems Some valuable info on NAS / RAID design can be found in this video as well. plus other general server hardware info is addressed.At time 55:40 in the the video more info and insight regarding DIY home NAS and RAID stability, reliability and design is discussed as well. Potentially saving a DIY person some pretty decent cash and at least some calories reading conflicting information online. All of which for some buyers reading reviews on amazon for this product would find useful or at least interesting.For me, my drives in my personal computer for this review are used for pure storage via Linux based operating systems. In some computer systems i've built are media servers, again using linux with LVM and sometimes MDADM , other times using RAID cards such as IBM M1015 , a cheaper version, of more expensive promise model cards with SAS.HGST is another maker of hard drives with good reputation and within the same general price range for some of their models, however western digital now owns them, formally Hitachi Global Storage Technologies . I've not taken the time while writing this to check if HGST drives feature some of the features the Red model line up offers.If you are going for a gaming system drive or require heavy I/O for a operating system drive, the red of course wouldn't be your best option.I use a WD Black drive, # WD3003FZEX for this . Steam games fill a drive quickly. With my budget and limited sata ports it makes a SSD fairly useless for storing games , or a media server gaming rig combo. Most of the time, once game is loaded , its mostly done , leaving the CPU and GPU left doing the work... . so for my needs esp dual booting , gaming on linux and windows using a Black model drive is my best option for my hardware , storage and requirements to have one type of operating system running most of the time. I do sometimes run Linux on a stand alone 120GB SSD , if I disconnect my optical drive , smaller ssd drives are quite inexpensive now and do make life a bit easier esp on aging desktop hardware.The cost per TB in a black model is still quite low for the performance level and the only high performance drive to offer a 5 year warranty standard. Especially when compared to a hybrid model drives cost and other drive makers of fast mechanical and hybrid solutions. Heavy gaming via steam would make a hybrid drives nand cache not very effective , fairly quickly iirc .Hopefully some of this info will prove useful , or at least give some starting ground to look into , research options deeper that may not have been considered before.

After about six months of searching for the perfect drive, I finally settled on two of these Western Digital Red 2TB WD20EFRX hard drives. I was ready to purchase HGST enterprise drives, the former Hitachi, but WD came out with these drives just in-time. I wanted to get the 3TB WD30EFRX version for my Synology DS212 NAS, but the price difference didn't make that much of a sense, and 2TB drives are more than enough for a few years of my home office use. I am very happy that these drives MTBFs are rated at 1,000,000 hours, they use less power, and they are cheaper than other enterprise drives.Upon receiving, I immediately installed them in my NAS. It took about 15 minutes to install DSM 4 and begin the inspection process. I neither chose Raid 1, JBOD, or SHR, and I took some online advice and created two separate volumes, one on each disk, to have two independent file systems. In this case, you don't have to worry about rebuilding disk arrays if any drives fail, and you always have a backup present. I was planning on using Folder Sync feature to sync all folders from Disk 1 to Disk 2 every other hour, but I found out this feature only works on two independent Synology Disk Stations; however, you can use automated backup feature to backup data from Disk 1 into Disk 2, and it produces about the same result as Folder Sync does, and it gives you a few more options for backing up system and application files as well.Synology volume creation took about 7 hours for each drive with automatic bad sector reallocation feature. I later tested each drive with S.M.A.R.T extended test--each took about 4 hours--and I am happy to report that I did not have any bad sectors on either of the drives. That is, the "Reallocated Sector Count" reads zero in S.M.A.R.T report.The drives are surprisingly quiet. I had an enterprise RE2 500GB in my NAS, and it was thunderstorm loud compared to these. The temperature is also very reasonable. When the drive is resting it is about 31C/88F, and under heavy usage it rises up to 35C/95F. Although these drives speed are only 5000 rpm, I don't see any difference in file transfer speed. The only downside that I could sense was the startup time from sleep. I feel that compared to my old WD RE2 drive, it takes a good 2 to 5 seconds more for the NAS to come out of sleep each time. Not a deal breaker, but something to consider when you invest in these drives.I think WD has done a good job with these drives, and they are currently the best on the market for home or home office use. That being said, I still think WD RE4 drives are the best enterprise drives and ultimate in performance; however, if you are looking for a good set of drives for your NAS, and the power consumption and noise are important to you, these WD Red drives will work just fine. Compared to desktop drives, these come with a few enterprise features that come in handy and will save you some time and money down the road.