Western Digital Red WD30EFRX 3TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

Pros: High capacity, quiet, good price. Seem to be responsive and if you plan ahead for a 25% failure rate and have spares on hand they may be fine!

Cons: You had better buy extra. Bought 4 for an HP MicroServer running FreeNas 8.3., One drive had extensive errors in less than 48 hours. Bought four of the two terabyte versions for another NAS project and one of the four drives failed in a week. After the initial failures within the first week or so, they seem to be okay but I am cautiously optimistic.

Other Thoughts: Western Digital has been my first choice for hard drives for a number of years. Don't know if it is just me but I seem to be replacing more than usual. WD replaces them easy enough but it is still creates a lot of work and an inconvenience for the user. Don't put anything important on them until after they have had a week or so to bake in and power cycled a few times. Probably will chose another color drive for my next NAS project but WD and newegg will remain first choice for now with hopes that this was just a manufacturing glitch.

Pros: Big storage for cheap.

Cons: bought 2 for a raid 1. 1 failed right away, sent it back to newegg for a replacement. The replacement failed in less than a day... Sent that one to WD for an RMA. Got it back and it worked. Worst drives...

Other Thoughts: Dont buy these!!

Pros: seems fast, 4tb

Cons: The drive has 764436.5 MB or 746.52 GB of "unallocated" disk space that I cant partition it. I called Western Digital and the guy on the phone said i should return it for exchange from the store I bought it from. Lots of bad reviews here hence because 4 tb on a single disk, i still gave it a try., but failed. Newegg was big help, easy RMA, but w/o shoprunner you will have to pay return shipping.

Pros: They have red labels and they arrived rather quickly.

Cons: Do not buy these drives from NewEgg. I purchased two of these for a home NAS project. One was a brick right out of the box. The other spun up and mounted, but failed a zero-write format.

Other Thoughts: The other reviewers are right. These drives are bad and shame on NewEgg for continuing to sell them to us.

I don't know if all WD Red drives are bad - or if they sent all the bad Reds to NewEgg to dump off on to us.

We have 13 drives around the house. All but two are Western Digital drives. All but one still work. I think that one of them is as old as a 20Gb drive. Remember those? That one still works.

I saw the bad reviews before I made my purchase. But I thought surely by now NewEgg and Western Digital have realized that some of the drives are bad (they actually reply to some of the negative reviews). I thought that maybe they cared enough about their customers to work together to diagnose the problem and pull the bad batch. I thought that after finding the issue they might actually stop shipping drives that didn't work.

I was wrong. They don't care enough to pull the bad drives. They are still shipping bad drives.

So I contacted NewEgg and asked them to pay for return shipping. The drives arrived at the end of the week, so I had to wait over the weekend because there was no one around at NewEgg to answer my request and I started thinking... I know. That's how I got into this trouble in the first place, right?

But I thought, do I really want more bad Western Digital Red drives from NewEgg? I mean, if they don't care enough to work with Western Digital to diagnose and solve the problem before sending me the two original bad drives, what's to stop them from sending me more bad drives, right? So I contacted Western Digital directly.

The bad Reds are such an issue that there is even a special bad red drive hotline. And, true to form - Western Digital is out of stock on the 3Tb. They have no idea when they will have them back in stock. I kid you not. I actually asked the customer service rep to upgrade me to two black drives, but he pretended that selling me the two bad drives and then making me wait another week - or probably longer - for replacement drives was nothing to be surprised about.

Don't make the same mistake that I did. Do not buy these drives. Do not buy them from NewEgg. Do not buy them until somebody tells you that they have worked out the issues - They haven't yet.

Pros: Works as advertised. Great for server storage constantly being accessed via the network.

Cons: They do seem to run a little hot but proper ventilation fixes that.

Other Thoughts: I bought the first one 4 months ago to test in one of my servers. It performance was very consistent and reliable. Its worked out so great for me I bought another and then another. I have three more planned.

Its a shame so many people are getting DOA and a greater shame that this trend is growing across the industry. Too often it seems that when I order more than 2 products the chances of a DOA increase exponentially. If I buy over 5 products its almost guaranteed that something will be dead.

Pros: Relatively fast considering the IntelliPower, quiet, cool, large capacity, 3-YEAR WARRANTY. Best price per gig on a drive with more then 2 year warranty at the time of purchase.

Cons: None so far. The drive wasn't free, but that's not a con, you get what you pay for.

For anyone that complains about the "Missing space" after partition and format, you need to realize the difference between GiB (base 10, 1000MiB = 1 GiB) and GB (base 2, 1024MB = 1 GB). People/HDD manufacturers work off base 10, computers work off base 2. When you get a disk with a capacity of 3TB, that's 3000000000000 bytes. Divide it by 1024 enough to get to TB (4 times) and you end up with 2.728TB. Subtract a bit from that for Partition Table and File System overhead and you'll get the usable capacity.

Other Thoughts: Upon recieving this disk, I threw it in a USB 3.0 enclosure and proceeded to thrash it with 2 or 3 passes of dd writing from /dev/random, then a badblocks sweep to verify that the drive wasn't going to fail immediately. I've had the disk serving media from my Debian box for 4 months now and I haven't had an issue. I would recommend this drive over the 3TB WD Green simply because this drive has a longer warranty. I haven't used the NAS appliance specific features since I'm not running a RAID card, or even software RAID at this point. I just added the drive as an additional physical volume for my LVM pool and moved my logical volumes to it from a 1TB WD Green and a 2TB Samsung EcoGreen.

Again, for anyone that complains about the "Missing space" after partition and format, you need to realize the difference between GiB (base 10, 1000MiB = 1 GiB) and GB (base 2, 1024MB = 1 GB). People/HDD manufacturers work off base 10, computers work off base 2. When you get a disk with a capacity of 3TB, that's 3000000000000 bytes. Divide it by 1024 enough to get to TB (4 times) and you end up with 2.728TB. Subtract a bit from that for Partition Table and File System overhead and you'll get the usable capacity.

Pros: fantastic drive for use in freenas setup, have had no issues with the disks, have 8 and have them in a raid-z2.

Cons: larger size maybe? or 128mb cache? not really sure

Other Thoughts: wish newegg would have let me buy all eight i needed at once from them, but i suppose they must limit the purchases so everyone can get them, just means another vendor got a sale that would have gone here to get 2 of the drives

Pros: quite, fast, and nice total storage

Cons: 2 came DOA and I just had a third go offline in my NAS. I second another commentor's thoughts that these are the highest failure rates of a single drive in recent history

Pros: So... as a matter of course, Ive ALWAYS ran Hitachi drives untill now (Really the only reason I meandered into the ream of WD was due to their acquisition, which they later resold to Toshiba). Typically I only look at BAD reviews to see what others are bumping into & how it gets handled. After reading the bad reviews on this drive, I was a little leery -But I thought why not... This IS for a home SAN/NAS/Whatever-you-want-to-call-it, and the case Im using them in does have ventilation.

These are used in a FreeNAS rig at my house, with 6 of these spindles in a raid zpool2 (ZFS'aneese for Raid6), each of these drives formatted with ZFS comes to 2.7terb. With 6 of these in a Raid6 array, this comes to 10.7terb aggregate useable capacity shared by various CIFS mounts.

So far Ive had my first couple of these for a few months & no issues, when breaking new ones in -Ill typically let these run in a normal duty cycle for 24 hours, and then reconfig them to spin down after 20min & reconfigure the power saving mode as well.

Cons: Would be nice if they were consistently cheaper?

Pros: Rated for multi drive installations with 24x7 duty.

Cons: Dead on arrival. I have had the worst run of luck with WD drives. I'm using a UPS and taking other reasonable precautions.

Manufacturer Response:

We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced with the WD Red, as this is not the typical experience with the product.
It is unfortunate that you experienced a DOA drive, as our drives are all rigorously tested to ensure they are in good working condition before leaving our warehouse. We understand your situation and will gladly replace your in-warranty drive, as we stand by our products and their associated warranties.
How to get an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) or replace a defective product under warranty
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/8
We would appreciate the opportunity to further assist you, and resolve any further concerns you may have with the device and/or your experience. You may contact us at 1 (855) 559-3733, or via our support website at: http://support.wdc.com/contact/contact.asp?lang=en&ct=wdred. Please indicate within the online case creation or with the first support agent you speak with, that you are responding to a Newegg review, so we route you and your information to the correct team members.