Western Digital 6TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5640 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 128 MB Cache, 3.5" -WD60EFZX

The WD 1TB WDBMMA0010HNC-NRSN drive kit fully met my expectations. I bought this drive to make a RAID1 pair. The drive performed well in my home-built FreeNAS server and provided better network storage performance than expected without any glitches or issues.When compared with 750GB WD Black drives in the same server the RED drives appeared to give slightly better perforance in NAS. Maybe the NAS specific firmware isn't just marketing.For more, read on...I wanted to build a NAS server for windows sharing, iSCSI, and nfs sharing. I had an old 1U "pizza box" server with a core 2 dual CPU and 4GB of ram available plus SATA II (300MBPS) channels. I got one of the WDBMMA0010HNC-NRSN WD-red drives through the vine programs and I bought a second through Amazon to build this NAS server.This drive is the retail package. It came in a nice box with 4 screws for mounting and a little bit of very fine printed material which I didn't bother to read. If a "bare drive" is fine and you don't care about packaging you might want to consider another listing for the 1TB WD Red drives which may be at a lower price for essentially the same thing.The software I used to drive the NAS is the excellent (especially at the price) FreeNAS server. It installs on a USB stick of at least 2GB. My old box had several USB 2.1 ports, so no problem. I configured the drives in a RAID 1 mirrored array using software RAID (instead of the FRAID (fake raid) built into the motherboard chip set.I first built the server with the WD Red drives first and ran some casual tests with windows shares and iSCSI. Using windows network or iSCSI I could saturate my Gigabit Ethernet with no problem. Performance was not an issue. They ran great and I had no complaints over several days of use. This isn't too surprising as many NAS boxes use little Intel Atom processors.Next I did a comparison by replacing the WD Red drives with WD Black 750GB drives I had on the shelf. I didn't see much difference but I felt that copies of lots of small/medium files completed more quickly with the Red drives. Maybe the caching algorithm of drive was just better tuned for NAS on the Red drives.A plus is the Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER) which is an important part of drives that are designed for RAID deployment. And having a drive that is designed to be on 24X7 is great.I've switched back to the WD Red drives in my home-built NAS and I'll update this review as I live with the drives and report if there are any problems or notable excellence that stands out.Hope this bit of experience helps someone.Update: Dec 3, 2013I have recently gotten a Buffalo LinkStation 420 2TB 2-DriveNAS Personal Cloud Storage and Media Server In comparing my home built FreeNAS system (on old core duo hardware) with two of these drives to the LinkStation with 2 Toshiba drives was interesting. The FreeNAS system with the WD NAS drives (both systems with RAID1) ran about 50% faster than the LinkStation. You can check my review on the LinkStation for more information about my comparison.The LinkStation might be a better option to get diskless for a very low price use these drives inside it. The small footprint and low power make it an attractive option.Bottom-line it seems there may be something to the NAS specific firmware of these drives.

Reliability:I’ve been using the WD60EFRX 6TB drives in my QNAP TS-453A for just shy of 10 years, and honestly? I completely forgot they were still the original drives. That’s how quietly and reliably they’ve been doing their job—like the NAS equivalent of a dependable old friend who never calls attention to themselves but always shows up on time.They’ve been spinning 24/7 in a RAID 5 array, handling backups, media, and day-to-day tasks without a hiccup. Not a single SMART warning, not a whimper of protest, and no weird noises—just smooth, silent duty like clockwork.I only realized how old they were when I started planning my upgrade, and it hit me: these things have been running since before streaming 4K was even a thing.Western Digital nailed it with this one. If I could buy them a retirement watch, I would. But since I’m replacing them with the newer WD Red 10TB (WD101EFBX), I figured the least I could do is write a glowing eulogy—I mean, review.

These don't come partitioned or formatted, but easy enough to do. I'm using it not in a NAS, but just an internal drive in a WIn 11 pc. It works very well.

I will try to keep this short. I have owned over 10 Western Digital hard-drives and I have only ever had one go bad on me, but it was in a very hot slim height PC and that was 5 years ago. These drives have continued the Western Digital legacy (at least for me, maybe I am lucky).I own 4 of the WD Red 2 TB Hard Drives. 2 of the drives I bought here on Amazon, 2 of the drives I bought a week later on the Egg Site...Amazon had decent packaging, Egg had probably more packaging than was needed (and that is never a bad thing when it comes to hard-drives)I installed the first 2 drives, absolutely no problems. I immediately ran long hard drive tests using Seagate Seatools. 5 hours later and the drives are completely fine. I am using these to store large 1080p movie files (18GB's a piece usually). I use one drive to mirror the other using a program called Synchronicity. This is for the simplest (and in my opinion best) form of redundancy.I ran the long harddrive tests every 2 days for the next 6 days and the 2 drives passed completely fine on both of them (they were both nearly full from consolidating my movie collection to these drives).I bought 2 more of these drives on Egg when they were on sale and I had the exact same experience as before, they are perfect.I now have a total of 8TB of storage from these drives. (4TB for storing files, and 4TB for redundancy).Pros:Good value depending on when you buy (I got first batch for $106.99 a piece and the second batch for $99 a piece) I wouldn't pay over $120 for these.Reliable (I have had these for about a month and have ran many long drive tests and have had no errors so far. I will continue to do so and update this review)Cons:I don't have any thing bad to say about these drives.Other Advice:If you receive a drive that wasn't packaged well THEN RETURN IT.You can only blame yourself if you use and don't return a drive that is packaged incorrectly, and then the drive goes bad.