WD Red 2TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6 Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD20EFRX

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Product Specifications

Specifically designed for use in NAS systems with up to 8 bays
Tested for 24x7 reliability
NASware firmware for compatibility
3-year limited warranty
Small and home office NAS systems in a 24x7 enviornment
Package includes a hard drive only - no screws, cables, manuals included. Please purchase mounting hardware and cables separately if necessary.
Ships in WD-certified box for safe transit during shipping
Capacity: 2 TB
Rotational Speed (RPM): IntelliPower
Cache: 64 MB
Interface: SATA3
Data Transfer Rate: 6 Gb/s Buffer to Host (max); 145 MB/s Host to/from drive (typical)
Form Factor: 3.5 inch
Read/Write:4.4 Watts
Sleep: 0.6 Watts

Product Description

Size:2TB WD Red is the only hard drive designed for NAS systems that have 1-5 drive bays. The drives are designed and extensively tested for compatibility in the unique 24x7 operating environment and demanding system requirements of home and small office NAS.

Product Reviews

Their warranty is a joke.

I am sorry but WD’s warranty is a joke. Bought two brand new HDDs, one failed a few months after being in my RAID 1 NAS. Returned under warranty (had to pay for shipping) - got back a RECERTIFIED HDD. Which, of course, failed after 1 month and lost ALL data. Returned it again (had to pay for shipping) - again got a RECERTIFIED HDD which was simply DOA and could not start at all. So their “5 year warranty” is simply feeding you with faulty recertified HDDs until you run out of money for shipping them dead ones. Great idea, WD. Sorry, cannot trust you my data anymore. Going to your competitors.UPDATE: After a long back-and-forth I was finally sent a brand new drive which functions fine now. Upgraded from 1 to 3 stars.

Excellent drives, good packaging from Amazon, and some potentially useful information.

Excellent Drives. I’ve been running a variety of WD Red, Green, and Seagate Archive Drives for the better part of several years, and I thought that I would share some useful advice for things to watch out for when buying new drives, and detecting infant mortality.First thing to look for is to observe the packaging the drive arrives in. It is industry practice to ship one or more drives in boxes that are made to perfectly fit the drive. Inside the box, the drive should be suspended with two plastic holders. These holders suspend the drive and dampen any drops the package may experience during transit. (Bulk orders (15+) may be shipped in a single larger box with foam cut-out arrays).Secondly, when installing the drives, make sure that your hands are clean. Give them a wash, or better yet, wear gloves. Avoid transferring finger/hand oil to the drives so that hot-spots aren’t created.Thirdly, once the drives are installed, give them a full, long format. You can run 1, 3, 5, (or even more) passes on the disks. This ensures that every single sector of the drives gets written to. Once the format is complete, look up the SMART data, and check the values for anything alarming. If a drive suffered damage in shipping, now is when it may be noticeable. Compare the values to your other drives. Start-up times, head parks and so fourth may vary slightly so there’s nothing to be worried about a little deviation there, but pay attention to failed reads, reallocated sectors, and RUEs.Granted, all of this advice should be taken with a grain of salt since SMART values are not the silver bullet to predict drive failure, but this testing should be a good indicator on whether or not a drive is ready for production use.Above all else, remember that backups are your friend.

It’s fast, quiet, relatively cool and HUGE.

On Windows it comes out to 5.45TB. I transferred a little over 2TB to it and average write speed was 110MB/s. Right now it’s just sitting on top of my computer case but after that long transfer I used a temp gun and the surface of the case was 87F and the drive was 101F.UPDATE ****I just purchased a second drive and did some testing on it while blank and uploaded the results under customer images to the right.

Overly aggressive head parking, slow accesses

I have two of these, one made in 2015 and the other in 2016. Strangely, the 2016 one has louder accesses than the 2015 one. Both run cool, as they should, due to the low RPMs. Access is slow, so these should only be used for media storage. They have aggressive, loud head-parking, which is completely unnecessary, especially for drives designed for NAS (frequent, sometimes-simultaneous random access). It’s a quick way to wear out the drive; it’s planned obsolescence. Parking problems have plagued many WD and Seagate drives for years before 2015, yet despite numerous user protests, these corporations only designed the problems into even more of their lineups. Luckily, my WD drives’ parking can be disabled in firmware via WD’s WDIDLE3 tool. The tool isn’t listed on the support page for these drives, but it works at least for my versions.This isn’t a remedy WD will officially reply with when asked about this drive’s parking; but it’s known amongst many users. Blame Seagate too, as their 3TB ST3000DM001 drives park even more aggressively, have a higher failure rate, and have no way to disable the parking in firmware. While stooping down to just above the competition may have been a good short term business decision, WD has lost my trust in the long term. Because of the astronomically higher performance, higher reliability, imperviousness to vibration, higher portability, silence, lesser heat output, and decreasing costs of SSDs, I see no reason to buy WD or Seagate again. I’d give WD 1 star, but because I gave the Seagate drive a 1-star review, I’ll give WD 3 stars to differentiate them: 2 stars of difference, one for the fact that the WD drives didn’t fail me when the Seagate ones did and another for the fact that the parking can be disabled in firmware (though WD doesn’t want you to know this). I’d give WD 1 star if I could give Seagate negative stars.

dead in 1 hour. 1. as in a single finger held up.

im not sure what is happening over there at amazon quality control. i got this drive out of its packaging today, installed it in my desktop computer, started loading files on it and it failed WITHIN AN HOUR. dead. spinning, but dead. so i initiated a return and when i was repackaging it to send back i noticed that there was a gap in the seam on the edge of the drive, and I COULD SEE THE PLATTERS. well, kids, if you can see the platter on a hard drive and its open to the air, well, its lucky it went an hour. surprising, in fact. amazing, even. so. not sure the culprit. refurbished drive but they dont tell you? angry amazon employee? mailman with a mean streak? im not sure if this review helps because lots of people have bought them with no problem, i just wanted to document what happened. its true. all of it.

Dead with in 2 Hours!

Replaced a dead WD HDD in a mybook with this new one. With in 2 hours of backing the new one up it died.

Great thermal performance

This is amazing… so much storage for the buck. I changed the old WD Green with this unit in a really small passively cooled NAS device, and the average temperature measured on…

Good cheap storage

I put four of these in a Qnap TS-431 and they have been doing fine for almost two years now, no problems at all.

Very quiet drive, not as hot as some other drives.

Quick and painless installation, very quiet in operation.

Working Perfect so Far

These are working perfectly well in a Synology DS216+II NAS DiskStation, so they get five stars. I know someday, hopefully years from now, they will start to fail.

Nice Drives.

Had for about a month in a Synology DS916. I have 3 in the DS916 and one as a spare that I hopefully won’t need. No issues so far.

In the process of running SMART tests on my system

I purchased two of the 3TB drives together last year. These were up nearly continuously since April of 2016 with no problems in a FreeNAS server I’m running at home.