WD Red Plus 3TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s, CMR, 64MB Cache, 3.5 Inch - WD30EFRX

Pros: Newegg sent me two of these drives to test, I used gnome-disks to test the latency and bandwidth and badblocks to test for errors. The tests were run on a Skylake iCore7 system running Fedora 23.
I did overnight runs of badblocks on both drives as well as the built in SMART extended test. All tests passed with no errors and no errors reported in the SMART status. This says nothing about long term reliability but out of the box the drives are solid.

Cons: The performance of the drives is mediocre. I tested both drives at 1MByte, 10MByte and 100MByte transfers and for comparison I tested an HGST 3TB NAS drive in the same system.

Western Digital WD30EFRX

1 MB sample size
read 126.2 MB/s (1000 samples) (peak of 171)
write 50.8 MB/s (1000 samples) (peak 56)
latency 16.47 msec (1000 samples)

10 MB sample size
read 126.2 MB/s (100 samples)
write 109.1 MB/s (100 samples)
latency 16.47 msec (1000 samples)

100 MB sample size
125.4 MB/s (100 samples)
122.0 MB/s (100 samples)
16.50 msec (1000 samples)

HGST
10M
160.2 MB/s (100 samples)
97.1 MB/s (100 samples)
7.48 msec (1000 samples)

100M
161.5 MB/s (100 samples)
156.9 MB/s (100 samples)
6.72 msec (1000 samples)

As you can see the read bandwidth of the WD drive is a 127MByte/second and the write bandwidth is at best 122MBytes/second. By comparison the HGST drive came in at 160MByte/sec read and as high as 156MByte/second write.

The latency of the WD drive is terrible, 16.47 msec vs 7.48 msec for the HGST. For NAS applications I don't think these numbers are particularly important because the network connection to NAS system will be the limiting factor. In servers and desktops you should be using SSDs as your primary storage and hard drives for bulk storage so once again the performance doesn't really matter. In my Linux systems I'm using SSDs as caches with hard drives providing the backing storage, this gives me the speed of SSDs and the capacity of hard drives in a unified file system.

Overall Review: About Me: I'm a Newegg EggXpert, we aren't paid for these reviews but we do get free review units. I'm an engineer who has been designing computers since the 1970s. I specialize in networking and high performance computing.

Pros: Nice and heavy construction. Very little vibration and heat when running.

Cons: Ordered 4 drives for a new NAS. Only 2 worked. Newegg did a great job of packaging them (foam case and bubble wrap so I don't think it was the shipping that killed them.

Overall Review: One of the drives would not even spin up. The other did, but would fault as soon as you accessed it. Bought these for a new NAS and 50% failures out of the box is not something I expected. It has been a long time since I had this kind of failure rate on hard drives. Hope I did not make a mistake purchasing this brand. Now waiting for replacements from Newegg.