WD Red Plus 10TB NAS Hard Disk Drive – 7200 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s, CMR, 256MB Cache, 3.5 Inch – WD101EFBX – OEM

Pros: As I said in my previous review of this drive, it’s extremely quiet and vibration-free. Quietest drive I’ve ever seen.

Cons: None.

Overall Review: I wrote in my previous review that I would buy a second one of these drives, and I did. I now have two of these in a Synology DS212j NAS, and it’s dead quiet. So quiet, in fact, that I have to look at the LED indicators to see if the drives are spinning. Love them.

Pros: Low power, runs cool, relatively fast.

Cons: After 76 hours of use, one drive failed a SMART long self-test with a read error.
WD advance return wants to pre-charge $260 for one of these drives, returned when the failed drive is received.

Overall Review: Both drives were made in Malaysia. Both were wiped with zeros and had no problems, then were put in a mirror.

Pros: – IntelliPower
– 64MB cache
– 3 year Warranty
– Great price for Server-grade drive

Cons: None so far.

Overall Review: I bought three of these WD Red 1TB drives for a RAID5 configuration after months of research and waiting for the best prices. I have primarily used Desktop Seagate drives in my Home Server that acts as an HTTP/FTP/NAS/Squid/Dansguardian running CentOS and mdadm for over three years; some even with s.m.a.r.t. errors and bad sectors. The performance was terrible ( obviously, I do ask a lot from my servers ) and I decided it was time to upgrade. I pulled these puppies from their fairly well packaged boxes, let them adjust to ambient room temperature, and took pictures of the serial numbers. I immediately registered them with WD warranty website. After they had adjusted, I ran WD’s bootdisk and did full scan’s on each drive. It took about 8hrs for three drives. No problems at all. I already had a consumer drive running CentOS in my four port SATA so I installed the three RED’s and built my RAID5 with mdadm and XFS filesystem. I chose XFS because it has customisations that are great for software RAID’s, and performance was rated highly running on Linux. After that was complete, I set up samba and started backing up my data. At first my speeds were not so great, around 20MB/s. So I did some homework and found these options in my smb.conf that DOUBLED my speed:

socket options = SO_RCVBUF=131072 SO_SNDBUF=131072 TCP_NODELAY

WOW! Now we’re cookin’! I get anywhere from 40-46MB/s write speed, and the same read speed over 1Gbps lan. Also, I compared my two servers side-by-side (same makes and models running same CentOS 6.3 and samba) and as I watched the drive led’s during transfers from the old server to the new one, I noticed how much more the old drives had to work ( reads/writes ) compared to these RED’s. My speculation the reason they didn’t have to work as hard is the RED’s have 64MB cache, spin at slower speeds with IntelliPower (about 5900rpm), and have less agressive head parking. It was pretty neat to watch my old drives work like dogs, and these new RED’s didn’t even break a sweat! I’m happy with their performance, the three year warranty, but I will have to update after three years on their durability. As of right now, I am a very happy customer! ~ J.S.

Pros: Supports TLER
Good for Raid
Newer HDD design
Price

Cons: I bought two of these for a Raid0 setup. One was flawless out of the box…up and running. The second? Not so much. The SATA power port was mangled. Oddly, the packaging was flawless…not a single dent. This can only mean one thing: someone wasn’t checking the HDD’s as they were being placed in their OEM boxes nor as they were being placed in the Newegg shipping box.

Overall Review: CS was very good help considering. Sent me a return shipping label (UPS ground…I was hoping for overnight or advanced replacement) and Overnight shipping for the new one once the old makes it past the review process. However, this still sucks because I received the HDD’s as 2 for a purpose…RAID0. You can’t RAID unless you have both. It will be over a week now for me waiting to complete this build because someone at WD AND Newegg didn’t check the product before sending it out.

Pros: CMR is good, capacity for price is great, low noise level is good.

Cons: 33% DOA rate is disheartening

Overall Review: Expanding my Qnap NAS’s capacity into a RAID5 and I purchased (3) 4TB Red’s to go with a 4th that I had previously purchased. When I powered it on, 1 of the new drives showed 0TB, so I tried relocating it to another bay and same thing. Returned it to Newegg for a refund and I bought another one, which worked fine.

Pros: Using 4 of these Hard Drives in a Synology NAS. Run great and extremely quiet. Fast read/write. Great for the price

Cons: None at the moment….they weren’t free 🙂

Pros: Affordable nearly-enterprise-quality drive in a quiet and cool running package. Reasonable performance. Single-platter design. Fully compatible with Adaptec 6-series RAID controllers. Comparatively low read error rate.

Cons: So quiet and smooth-running that you can’t even tell if it’s spinning. That’s really all I can think of…

Overall Review: To mimic another recent review, the four drives I ordered were packaged with extreme care by Newegg! The drive connections and sides were encased in 1″ of rigid styrofoam which looks like it was broken off the bulk packing from WD. This 2×2 arrangement was then wrapped in two layers of bubble wrap and packed with plenty of styrofoam peanuts. Thanks to this, I’m running all four in a RAID10 array managed by an Adaptec 6405 (also purchased from Newegg) with nary an issue. Sandra disk read benchmark averages just over 300MB/sec. The Adaptec 6405 has so far been trouble-free with these drives, a great combination in my book.

Pros: Not as power hungry as the 7200 models.
Designed for RAID so it has TLER (Time-Limited Error Recovery).
VERY quiet.
All 5 worked right out of the box with no issues.

Overall Review: I though 5640 RPM was a little strange, so I read up on it a little bit. Turns out WD has been making drives with the RPM for a while, but in the past has mis-marketed their drives with a “classification” rather than the actual speed. These were previously marketed as “7200 RPM-Class” and do indeed seem to perform accordingly, but it is nice to know the actual speed. I was specifically looking for 5400 RPM drives for my low power NAS, and 5640 is close enough. I wouldn’t have bought if I though they were 7200. These have a long, slow startup which is nice so as to not tax my PSU too much. With 5 of these, my entire NAS draws only 100W during power up, and idles around 60W.
The quietness of these drives in my NAS are noticeable compared to my server which has WD Gold drives. The Gold are so noisy you can hear them from the next room over (they are high-performance RAID drives), while these Red Plus drives I can’t hear sitting right next to the system.