WD Red Pro 4TB NAS 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - 7200 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR Recording Technology, 256MB Cache

Bought this 10tb drive to replace a 5 year old 6tb drive in a NAS, as usual with WD its great and time will tell if it lasts.Only thing to mention is it runs noticeably louder than my previous drives

If NVMe speed is not the driving factor rather a reliable backup is then these are a good alternative I run 2 of these in a RAID 0 set giving me 32TB of backup space and they are very good, Performance is surprisingly fast and as its just two disks after 4 years I'll mothball these as a backup of that day and pop in two new ones (in 4 years time that's more likely to be SSD). Today though with an inexpensive Enclosure its an inexpensive and reliable backup solution when you need high volume backups. I use these as a fast tertiary backup so Raid 0 is fine. I would never recommend Raid 0 as your only backup option.

I've been using Toshiba drives recently in my NAS drive, I was impressed with them, but now at only around 3 years of low use i'm starting to see errors in the SMART reporting system.Now I know it doesn't always mean they're going to die imminently....but they could...so it was time to start replacing them, and as i expect 5 years minimum from a low usage drive I decided to leave Toshiba & go back to Western Digital....I've tried Seagate before and found them to be very poor on the reliability front..so WD it is.This is my first time on these particular drives, the Red PRO, it uses CMR technology which is supposed to be a step up from the old SMR technology, faster speeds and reliability, also these have a 5 year, (limited) warranty...the Pro is a little bit more expensive than the basic Red version, but hopefully the little bit more spent equates to a better drive overall with a longer lifespan...Hopefully if it works well i'll replace my other drives with these Red plus ones too.

Package arrived in a small plain cardboard box. No fragile label and no outer box with foam packing. Clearly split from a much better-packaged and protected job lot case and cheaped out on transit protection.It was an urgent order, so I didn't have the time to refuse delivery for inadequate packaging or fully test and RMA it.My preferred supplier Scan UK only stocked up to 18TB Red Pros at the time these 20TB drives were the highest capacity and now that 24TB Red Pro drives have been out for months only stock up to 22TB.I wish I had refused delivery or returned.Within a week there were a few bad sectors.Health in HD Sentinel has now in 2024 (T+2yrs) deteriorated to CRITICAL 10% Health with 854 BAD SECTORS during self test.40 WEAK SECTORSS.M.A.R.T.5,Reallocated Sectors Count,1,100,100,OK,000000000001,0,Enabled196,Reallocation Event Count,0,100,100,OK (Always passing),000000000001,0,Enabled197,Current Pending Sector Count,0,100,100,OK (Always passing),000000000028,0,Enabled198,Off-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count,0,100,100,OK (Always passing),000000000356,0,EnabledA 10TB WD Red Pro installed in the same machine June 2019 is still perfect with no bad or weak sectors.I expect better packaging, particularly when Amazon overpackage robust items.

I bought another pair of the 4TB WD Red Pro drives to go in another Synology DS218 NAS, my third now. These drives have the extra benefit of being optimised for NAS working and are heavy duty, and the Synology knows about them and how to make the best use of the system.Except for some chatter when the heads are seeking, I cannot hear them working unless I use a screwdriver as a "mechanic's stethoscope" on the box. The box runs cool.The drives do not come with a fitting kit, but this is not required in most installations which expect to see standard drives and have appropriate mounting systems, as is the case with the Synology.Commissioning and drive checking took about an hour, including unpacking, initialising, updating, and installing all the software and permissions needed.The end capacity in the NAS is not 4TB, but much closer to 3.6TB after big-drive formatting and RAID system are taken into account. However I am happy with this as it is about two years worth of storage, and then it will be time for another newer RAID drive.More smaller new systems with incremental improvements instead of one big old slow one is like having several easily managed baskets for one's precious eggs instead of a big heavy one just asking to be dropped.

Ordered in July 2021 and still functioning without issues to date.

Really easy to set up. Works well

Bought this as a replacement drive for one that recently started giving out messages of imminent failure, in my NAS. I’ve always used WD Red drives in all my NAS devices and find them very quiet, in use. Got the pro version of the drive, as it was such a good price, but I’d have no problem going for the plus, if the price of the pro was too high. The only issue I had with this order was that, as per my photos, the packaging was nowhere near good enough for a computer hard drive. Just a bit of scrunched up paper on top of the drive is not enough as the seller should really be much more careful about how they are shipping out items like this. WD pro drives do have good warranties but I hope I don’t have to use it because of appalling packaging.