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

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.

Pros: Bought 2 red 3TB drives & had to return both drives that failed with bad sectors. Has WD lost the quality ?
Not sure what alternatives are there ?

Cons: 2/2 drives had

Pros: Drive are quiet and worked well in the beginning. Great application for a synology NAS.

Cons: One drive failed after 2 months are little use. I finally decided to backup my mac mini and was awoken to the NAS beeping. Drive has degraded. Used synology software to repair the drive and attempted again, same annoying beep. Same drive keeps failing anytime I try to add and files now.

Other Thoughts: Sad that this has such a high failure rate or at least seems to have a high rate of failure. I have not contact WD yet but I will for sure as I have never had a hard drive fail before. In 9 years of building my own computers and such I have never once had a drive fail. Guess there is always a first but disappointed that my first was from a well known company. Would expect it from a no name brand but not from WD.

Pros: I have two of these drives running in a Synology DS212 for 4 months with no issues. Rock Solid Quiet and Cool

Cons: Purchased 5 of these drive for a Synology DS1812+, Two drives were DOA, did not want to wait for RMA replacement so I bought 2 more and sent the bad drives in for a refund.
New drives arrived and 1 one them is DOA, will not initialize (cyclic redundancy error) Now sending in for another RMA replacement. Western Digital's quality is slipping. I have never seen so many drives DOA, the packing from Newegg was excellent, if this is from prior shipment from Western Digital or from handling something needs to be corrected.

Other Thoughts: Bought these drive on sale, should have been a good deal but has been nothing but headaches.

Pros: Received with no issues. Passed GSmartControl's extended self-test (a full disk surface scan that took nearly nine hours to complete).

Running rather quiet and cool.

Cons: None