Question 1

Do these drives come with their respective SATA cables or do I have to buy separate?

Accepted Answer

You'll have to buy the sata data cable separate. Generally, drives on Newegg are sold "oem" and would not come with cables. "Retail" product offerings for the same exact drive generally come with a cable. As far as that goes though, you won't find a retail boxed edition of any of the WD Red drives, but "retail" would be a keyword to help you in your search if you were interested.

Question 2

Looking for customers who had 2+ years with this drive and still functioning, how is the reliability?

Accepted Answer

Not sure why NewEgg asked me to respond to your question because I have not had this particular drive for 2 years.  However, I have had a couple of 1 TB Red Pro drives for the better part of 3 years and they are fine.  I also use WD Black drives in computers and they seem to live forever, too.

Question 3

Would these NAS drives be a good choice as storage drive?

Accepted Answer

Oh heck yes, km using it as a media (D:/) drive.  Using a 1tb as c:/ and both working flawlessly, had issues with WD in the past, but they have taken care of them and are better than Seagate now, A+ grade for the 1 & 2 TB drive's!  Hope this helps, cheers.

Question 4

Is this CMR or SMR?

Accepted Answer

According to WD: As described in our recent article Western Digital admits 2TB-6TB WD Red NAS drives use shingled magnetic recording (SMR), some users can experience performance problems in situations such as adding the drives to RAID groups which use conventionally magnetic recording (CMR) drives. Personally, I am experiencing superior reliability and performance, but I am not using this drive in a mixed RAID array. Apr 24, 2020

Questions & Answers