Amazon.com: Customer reviews: WD Red 8TB NAS Internal Hard Drive - 5400 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, CMR, 3.5"

Top positive review

B.E.N.T.

Parking was factory set to 300 seconds on my drives and they are working well.

Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2015

I purchased two of the 3TB drives and one of the 2TB drives. When I went into WDIDLE3 the setting for all three drives were set to 300 seconds (5 minutes). Since I was in there I simply disabled it. These drives are working flawlessly thus far as I have the two 3TB drives in a media center running Media Browser 3, PlayOn, and a few other apps. The 2TB drive is hooked up to a Dish Network Hopper as a secondary storage. I have not experienced any issues so far with these drive. I will update as time goes on with more info.

*Update 3/27/15: Some drive information obtained from HD Guardian:

Drive 01
Serial Number: WD-WCC4N7E*****
Firmware: 82.00A82
User Capacity: 3,000,592,982,016 bytes

Product Name Status Exp Date (MM/DD/YYYY)
3 TB WD Red Hard Drive In Limited Warranty 1/6/2018

Overall Health:
Temperature: 34*C
High: 36*C
Low: 34*C

Last Test: Completed without error.
No bad sector detected.
No ATA error detected.

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 185 182 021 Pre-fail Always - 5733
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 42
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 673
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 5
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 1
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 40
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 116 110 000 Old_age Always - 34
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0

Working Time: 673 hours (28 days, 1 hours)
Last Update Fri Mar 27 01:53:28 2015 CDT

Drive 02
Serial Number: WD-WMC4N0F*****
Firmware: 82.00A82
User Capacity: 3,000,592,982,016 bytes

Product Name Status Exp Date (MM/DD/YYYY)
3 TB WD Red Hard Drive In Limited Warranty 12/11/2017

Overall Health:
Temperature: 37*C
High: 41*C
Low: 35*C

Last Test: N/A
No bad sector detected.
No ATA error detected.

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 181 179 021 Pre-fail Always - 5950
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 50
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 672
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 4
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 1
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 48
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 113 109 000 Old_age Always - 37
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0

Working Time: 672 hours (28 days)
Last Update Fri Mar 27 01:53:28 2015 CDT

-------------------------------------------

Update 5/14/2015 Some drive information obtained from HD Guardian:

Drive 01
Serial Number: WD-WCC4N7E*****
Firmware: 82.00A82
User Capacity: 3,000,592,982,016 bytes

Product Name Status Exp Date (MM/DD/YYYY)
3 TB WD Red Hard Drive In Limited Warranty 1/6/2018

Overall Health:
Temperature: 37*C
High: 37*C
Low: 34*C

Last Test: Completed without error.
No bad sector detected.
No ATA error detected.

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 186 182 021 Pre-fail Always - 5700
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 193
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 98 98 000 Old_age Always - 1844
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 5
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 1
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 190
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 113 108 000 Old_age Always - 37
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0

Working Time: 1844 hours (2 months 16 days, 20 hours)
Last Update Fri May 14 22:31:35 2015 CDT

Drive 02
Serial Number: WD-WMC4N0F*****
Firmware: 82.00A82
User Capacity: 3,000,592,982,016 bytes

Product Name Status Exp Date (MM/DD/YYYY)
3 TB WD Red Hard Drive In Limited Warranty 12/11/2017

Overall Health:
Temperature: 37*C
High: 41*C
Low: 35*C

Last Test: N/A
No bad sector detected.
No ATA error detected.

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 181 179 021 Pre-fail Always - 5908
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 242
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 98 98 000 Old_age Always - 1836
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 5
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 1
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 240
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 110 106 000 Old_age Always - 40
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0

Working Time: 1836 hours (2 months, 16 days, 12 hours)
Last Update Fri May 14 22:31:35 2015 CDT

2 people found this helpful

Top critical review

Critical reviews›

H. Annen

The units work good but are not the most recent version.

Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2024

One of the Western Digital Red NAS in my network storage device failed so I replaced both of them. The 'old' drives were 'NASware 3.0' drives but these 'new' drives were 'NASware 2.0'. So (1) I'm glad I replaced both at the same time (to avoid mismatched NASware versions) and (2) not entirely pleased that the 'new' drives appeared to be an earlier generation.

23,889 total ratings, 14,053 with reviews

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From the United States

B.E.N.T.

Parking was factory set to 300 seconds on my drives and they are working well.

Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2015

Capacity: 3TBVerified Purchase

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Concretebrew

Great NAS drives.

Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2015

Capacity: 3TBVerified Purchase

I have been around computers since the mid 80's and remember purchasing my first hard drive. It was for my Apple II in an enclosure about half the size of the computer with a self-contained power supply, fans and all sorts of what were then, "goodies".

It was an SCSI drive and it had a whopping 25 megabytes of space at my disposal. The hard drive was a Shugart, named after the fellow that built them and the predecessor of what is today, Seagate.

There was a period of time in the 90's where my experiences with what were then the kingpins of hard drives, WD and Seagate simply did not prove reliable in a server or NAS environment which is why I always ended up paying top dollar for SCSI servers and enterprise drives that were significantly more expensive than an equivalent ATAPI desktop drive. When Samsung introduced their line of desktop drives, for the first time I felt comfortable using them in a server environment where they run 24/7.

Today, after testing hard drives as they come out in both sizes and formats, I found that by far, WD has the best NAS drives for the money and they are not that much more expensive than a regular desktop drive. In fact, the WD Black line, which is intended for desktops is also a terrific drive and would not hesitate to stick them in a NAS box with one from their Red line.

But I say so only from the point of view of reliability. As in the past I often found that anyone selling a non scuzzy drive claimed they were purpose built for a server environment, I questioned it as it seemed that I could not see any tangible evidence of them being anything more than the same drive as any other with a different label and a higher price.

I can quantify the difference even between a WD Black drive and the Red NAS line. The transfer speeds are higher and they don't run nearly as hot which explains their great longevity under enterprise environment. There are still good reasons for going with enterprise scuzzy drives if that is what you need and can afford it. But for the everyday person that simply wants to keep their data backed up off site or off their PC, the WD Red line is a terrific drive and deliver a lot of bang for the buck.

I presently have a location where I run 10 NAS boxes with two to four hard drives each and over time, the WD Red drives have outlasted Seagate's equivalents -- by a long shot. That is not meant to be a put down of Seagate because I use their hybrid drives on my desktops and they are terrific. I personally prefer them to WD's Black line even though I know they are also great drives.

I must admit that I am baffled when I read about someone these days getting, say, 4 new drives and one or two being DOA. Maybe I've been fortunate, but I have purchased hundreds if not thousands of hard drives and I have yet to get one tha was DOA. Some clearly perform better than others and last longer than others, but as a whole, I would say the hard drive market is extremely mature and whether they are made in China or the US, makes no difference.

All I can say is that in my experience and for my needs, the WD Red line is an excellent NAS drive and will continue to use them in the foreseeable future. Something else may come out that it is better or not. But when one is dealing with a NAS environment, there isn't much room for testing new equipment if the one I use now meets my needs and has proven itself.

As my needs change, I will go through due diligence in determining what will be best. But at least presently, there are alternatives to SCSI if you do not need it and the prices per megabyte are lower than ever. I highly recommend this line of drives from WD for its intended use.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

WBY

Excellent Hard Drive

Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2012

Capacity: 2TBVerified Purchase

Earlier this year, I took a chance purchasing Seagate's new 3TB HD for media storage and it died 2 months later. Since then I've purchased a 3TB Western Digital "RED" drive (I would have picked the WD "BLACK", but the price difference was a deal breaker). It's not in a NAS (just in PC), and with only one month in service I can say that at this point I'm pleased with the drive and it's performance. It's not as noisy, and certainly runs cooler than the dead Seagate, but time will tell.

UPDATE: 10-14-12

I didn't wait for the six month period to bump it to 5-star status. I didn't mention it before but the dead Seagate was in a USB external housing which is what I put this in. I almost never hear it, and while I haven't been as scientific as some (holding a stop watch, etc.)I have moved many large files to/from it, and then to two other external drives (same file each time) and the "RED" is by far the fastest, making things less time consuming. The others leave me toe-tapping or playing solitare until the transfers are complete. I bought a 2TB, not too long ago and plan to get 2 more 3TB drives before the end of the year. Yes, the RED series has a 3-year limited warranty.

UPDATE: 11-17-12

The 3TB RED and my 3, 2TB RED's are still very happy campers, on a 24/7 basis. I recently built a PC for a customer and put the 1TB RED in it (about 3 weeks ago) and they are very happy with the build, and the first comment I received was "It's so quiet". Our distributor tried to sway us from using these in anything other than a NAS, remarking that they were too slow, so I did some digging around various tech sites and came up with additional info:

Due to it's variable speed, Western Digital upped the MTBF from 650,000 hours to 1,000,000

3 year warranty with dedicated 24/7 support

WD doesn't state the actual spin-speed, merely saying it's Intellipower (meaning less than 7,200rpm), and from what I've seen most put it in the 5400 to 5900 RPM range.

The Drive's cache memory was upgraded from DDR to DDR2

In a test pitting RED against other brand hard drives which run at 7200 RPM, it came out in the middle of the pack on random data tranfers, however, when transferring large media files (in the 20+ GB range) the RED beat the Seagate Barracuda by 2 minutes.

UPDATE 12/31/12

No problems, runs cool, streams media great. The same goes for the 2- 2TB "RED" label drives in use.

UPDATE 02/26/13

8 months of 24/7 and still going strong (3TB), 6 months of 24/7 and still going strong (2TB). So far, everyone I've recommended these drives to (and bought them) are also "Happy Campers".

Update 06/28/2013
Nothing Good, Bad, or Ugly to add to my review. The system is up 24/7 in non-desirable conditions (76-80 degrees F, usually at 60%+humidity) and quality and reliability hasn't changed a bit! I can't recall but it has to be at least a year I've been using the "RED" label.

11 people found this helpful

Helpful

Alex

This drive works great no complaints

Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2024

Capacity: 3TBVerified Purchase

I purchased 4 of these drives for my Synology NAS. I use the NAS for hosting media for a handful of users with no noticeable latency even given the slower RPM. The only latency seemed to be due to the NAS hardware holding backing speeds and not the drives. The first drive started failing after about 6 years of constant use and was promptly replaced with no array issues. I would highly recommend WD red drives for future use.

Helpful

T. Mccleary

Nice hard drives for NAS or storage server with RAID.

Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2012

Capacity: 3TBVerified Purchase

If you're looking at this review, you're probably in the market for some honkin' big drives to stuff into a server or a NAS box. These Western Digital "Red" series drives are probably a total waste of money if you're planning to put them into a regular PC. If you're not doing a raid array of some kind, then save your money and buy the green or black series drives instead. If you're looking to set up a raid array of some sort, these are a bargain. They aren't the fastest drives, but they are rated to run 24x7 serving up data! Their 3 year warranty is above the current industry standard for consumer hard drives.

For my home-made FreeNAS (google it!) NAS/Server, I bought 5 WD Red drives from Adorama (purchased through Amazon) and 1 drive directly from Amazon.

The one drive from Amazon came very well packaged, double boxed in what looks like a WD cardboard box with a shock absorbing cradle. Very well packaged for shipment. Honestly, Amazon has been stellar for packaging boxes for shipment.

The 5 hard drives from Adorama came in a big box which 'clunked' when it was tilted. Opening the box revealed some big plastic pillow air strips, and 5 loose smaller boxes. Inside each of the smaller boxes was a few pillows and a factory bagged hard drive. There were not enough pillows in each box to securely cushion the hard drives against rattling around, so there's a high likelihood of damage in shipment. BAD SHIPPERS! NO DONUT!

Anyway, getting on to the performance of the drives... I'm running 6 drives in a ZFS RaidZ2 array. They are all controlled using an IBM M1015 PCIE 8x SATA 3 controller which has been flashed to be an HBA providing JBOD to the ZFS OS. That's a lotta acronyms! The speed of the array is quite fast... more than fast enough to saturate a gigabit network. I currently have about 5TB of data stored on the 10TB array.

On to the bad stuff...
One of the drives (I haven't checked the serial number to see which shipper it came from) is starting to give signs of premature failure after about 70 hours of operation. During a scrub of the data pool, drive DA5 is experiencing unreadable sectors. Luckily ZFS is able to calculate the correct values for the corrupted data, and is busily recreating the data onto another part of the drive. ZFS rocks for data reliability! If the drive does turn out to be bad, I have a WD Green 3TB drive that I can put into the array as a hot swap temporarily until the failed drive can be replaced. *UPDATE* The ZFS scrub just finished, and it repaired 1.53MB of data, with no data loss. Did I mention that ZFS rocks?

Warning/Advice about Data Storage:
Note 1: If you're going to be using these drives, or any data storage device for that matter, make sure that you take into account that these are highly fragile and delicate devices which can be easily damaged in shipment, or just plain up and fail when you least expect it. You really need to use some sort of redundant array of drives so that if one drive fails, your data doesn't vanish. In my case, the final configuration is going to be 6 drives in a RaidZ2 (dual parity striping), which means that my data stays intact and accessible even if 2 drives fail simultaneously. Also, there is going to be a 3TB Green drive as a hot spare that can take over for any failed drive in the array. With the hot-spare, my data can survive the loss of 3 drives without losing data (as long as the failures don't happen all at the same time).
Note 2: Always, always, always have a backup. In my case, I have two external 3TB USB3.0 drives which will be used only for backup purposes. Every so often, I'll backup the critical data onto the drives and stash them in my locker at work. If you don't have TrueCrypt, google it and see why your backup removable drives should be using it. If someone steals the drives, they only get the drives and not my data.

I'm giving 5 stars for the drives that work... 1 star for the failing drive... averages to about 4 stars score! I'll update this review once I have details on how the drives do in a week or so. Currently it ain't looking too good for drive DA5!

205 people found this helpful

Helpful

cbsc139

Solid reliable 14 TB drives for NAS

Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2024

Capacity: 14TBVerified Purchase

Replaced my Western Digital MyCloud PR2100 8 TB RED NAS drives (x2) with these WD RED NAS 14 TB drives as one of my drives was starting to fail and it was a good time to go ahead and increase the size of the drives as I was beginning to run out of space (RAID 1 so I was only getting 8 TB since the drives were mirrored). Decided against going with the 7200 RPM "newer" model as I had read reviews about the reliability being better on the 5400 RPM model which is what I purchased.

Followed the WD instructions to the T. It took about 3 days to get everything transferred over and run disk checks, but everything went well. The drives run a bit quieter than the original RED drives and the temp seems to be about 10 degrees cooler on each. Not sure why. Efficiency maybe??? Regardless, the drives have been great so far and I hope are reliable for the next several years until I get the itch to upgrade to non-mechanical drives in the same size, whenever those come out and don't cost the same as a car!

One person found this helpful

Helpful

fUNWiThTyPiNg

I bought two of these over 11 years ago, and still no SMART errors

Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2024

Capacity: 3TBVerified Purchase

What else do you really need to know? I bought these based on BackBlaze statistics, and they have far outlived anything I could have expected, and are still operating without errors. I use them for media storage, which means that they are used lightly, but every day.

Helpful

duke

Great drives

Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2015

Capacity: 4TBVerified Purchase

Let's get this out of the way first, I'm kind of a WD fanboy but with good reason I think. I've been using them for as long as I can remember, and maybe it's just my personal luck but I think they've been better to me than any other brand. The only ones I don't really like are the Green drives, and I'm willing to accept that they are perfectly fine as external drives that aren't being constantly accessed. The Green is in mega power saving mode and loves to spin down, which means you're looking at longer access times and more wear and tear if you leave it plugged in and access it frequently. I wanted to punch my monitor every time I waited the magical 5 minutes (or whatever it is) before clicking on what I needed, just to wait several seconds on the drive to spin back up.

I don't currently use NAS or RAID but considering my options this seemed like my best bet for frequently accessed mass storage, and I was at one point considering RAID (still am kind of). Black is "better," faster, and as such costs more, but I couldn't justify it since I have an SSD for things that need to be fast. I bought this 4TB Red to put in my computer and replace a 3TB Green external drive I was using. I've had it since August of 2014 which isn't that long at this point but it's given me zero reason to complain, same as the 3TB Red I bought in October to replace a 1TB Blue.

The only thing I've noticed that was cause for concern at first is these things seem to be a little louder than your standard WD Blue or Green drive on read and write operations, and I thought I may have gotten one with a defect. I'm not sure why that is, but I was much less concerned about it when I got the second drive and it sounded about the same. They seem to have quietened down some with use, and again they have given me no issues whatsoever.

I'll definitely be buying more of these when the time comes.

UPDATE 6/30/2015
Just wanted to say I am still running a 4tb and a 3tb WD Red in my computer and they've been absolutely trouble free. One of them seems to make a short quiet buzzing noise every now and then that sounds out of place if you're used to diagnosing bad drives by sound like I've had to do on many occasions, but every test I've run comes up clean and I've had no issues whatsoever out of either drive. Chkdsk, SMART, and benchmarks are clean and consistent and I use these daily as "secondary" drives for all my storage and most of my games. I really can't recommend these highly enough. That being said, I always feel the need to tell people KEEP BACKUPS. Any drive can fail and it's always painful when it happens if you don't have regular backups. It's not cheap to match storage space for backups but trust me... That one day you need it -- and you will one day or one year unless you replace your drives regularly -- it's money well spent.

Helpful

Gary E. Peterson

Regular consumer drives in RAID are accident waiting to happen

Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2012

Capacity: 3TBVerified Purchase

Here is a quote from a review at pcper.com

I'm going to let the cat out of the bag right here and now. Everyone's home RAID is likely an accident waiting to happen. If you're using regular consumer drives in a large array, there are some very simple (and likely) scenarios that can cause it to completely fail. I'm guilty of operating under this same false hope - I have an 8-drive array of 3TB WD Caviar Greens in a RAID-5. For those uninitiated, RAID-5 is where one drive worth of capacity is volunteered for use as parity data, which is distributed amongst all drives in the array. This trick allows for no data loss in the case where a single drive fails. The RAID controller can simply figure out the missing data by running the extra parity through the same formula that created it. This is called redundancy, but I propose that it's not.

Since I'm also guilty here with my huge array of Caviar Greens, let me also say that every few weeks I have a batch job that reads *all* data from that array. Why on earth would I need to occasionally and repeatedly read 21TB of data from something that should already be super reliable? Here's the failure scenario for what might happen to me if I didn't:
* Array starts off operating as normal, but drive 3 has a bad sector that cropped up a few months back. This has gone unnoticed because the bad sector was part of a rarely accessed file.
* During operation, drive 1 encounters a new bad sector.
* Since drive 1 is a consumer drive it goes into a retry loop, repeatedly attempting to read and correct the bad sector.
* The RAID controller exceeds its timeout threshold waiting on drive 1 and marks it offline.
* Array is now in degraded status with drive 1 marked as failed.
* User replaces drive 1. RAID controller initiates rebuild using parity data from the other drives.
* During rebuild, RAID controller encounters the bad sector on drive 3.
* Since drive 3 is a consumer drive it goes into a retry loop, repeatedly attempting to read and correct the bad sector.
* The RAID controller exceeds its timeout threshold waiting on drive 3 and marks it offline.
* Rebuild fails.

At this point the way forward varies from controller to controller, but the long and short of it is that the data is at extreme risk of loss. There are ways to get it all back (most likely without that one bad sector on drive 3), but none of them are particularly easy. Now you may be asking yourself how enterprises run huge RAIDs and don't see this sort of problem? The answer is Time Limited Error Recovery - where the hard drive assumes it is part of an array, assumes there is redundancy, and is not afraid to quickly tell the host controller that it just can't complete the current I/O request.

Here's how that scenario would have played out if the drives implemented some form of TLER:
* Array starts off operating as normal, but drive 3 has developed a bad sector several weeks ago. This went unnoticed because the bad sector was part of a rarely accessed file.
* During operation, drive 1 encounters a new bad sector.
* Drive 1 makes a few read attempts and then reports a CRC error to the RAID controller.
* The RAID controller maps out the bad sector, locating it elsewhere on the drive. The missing sector is rebuilt using parity data from the other drives in the array.
*Array continues normal operation, with the error added to its event log.

The above scenario is what would play out with an Areca RAID controller (I've verified this personally). Other controllers may behave differently. A controller unable to do a bad sector remap might have just marked drive 1 as bad, but the key is that the rebuild would be much less likely to fail as drive 3 would not drop completely offline once the controller ran into the additional bad sector. The moral of this story is that typical consumer grade drives have data error timeouts that are far longer than the drive offline timeout of typical RAID controllers, and without some form of TLER, two bad sectors (totaling 1024 bytes) is all that's required to put multiple terabytes of data in grave danger.

The Solution:
The solution should be simple - just get some drives with TLER. The problem is that until now those were prohibitively expensive. Enterprise drives have all sorts of added features like accelerometers and pressure sensors to compensate for sliding in and out of a server rack while operating, as well as dealing with rapid pressure changes that take place when the server room door opens and the forced air circulation takes a quick detour. Those features just aren't needed in that home NAS sitting on your bookshelf. What *is* needed is a WD Caviar Green that has TLER, and Western Digital delivers that in their new Red drives.

End quote and back to reviewer.
I've got 5 of these in a Synology DiskStation 5-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage (DS1512+) . It is really a sweet setup.

The Synology software has a S.M.A.R.T. test that can do surface scans to detect bad sectors. I have their Quick Test check every disk daily and the Extended Test set to automatically run on each of the 5 disks every weekend. (The Extended Test takes about 5 hours per disk so I separate the tests by 12 hours.)

1,785 people found this helpful

Helpful

Jimmy G. de Sac-town

Does what it's supposed to do

Reviewed in the United States on March 28, 2024

Capacity: 6TBVerified Purchase

My order from All4Computers was fulfilled promptly & professionally. The packing was done very thoughtfully in these cool little HD-specific air bubble protection packets. Been using the WD Reds for years without problems. Only bought new ones because I outgrew the old.

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WD Red 8TB NAS Internal Hard Drive - 5400 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, CMR, 3.5" - WD80EFAX

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WD Red 8TB NAS Internal Hard Drive - 5400 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256... › Customer reviews

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WD Red 8TB NAS Internal Hard Drive - 5400 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, CMR, 3.5" - WD80EFAX

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WD Red 8TB NAS Internal Hard Drive - 5400 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256...

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