WD Red NAS Hard Drives - Before You Buy

[@binarysun_]

I am using 10 WD reds at home. 4x3TB, 4x4TB, 2x12TB. With the 3TB being the oldest. And I have them since like 2011-ish. They are running in my NAS non-stop and only now the first disk (3TB) is starting to create read errors. So imho their longevity and roi is stellar.

[@PitboyHarmony1]

CoW: Copy-on-Write: the native feature of the Synology Btrfs file system. It is an odd 'mascot' for a NAS product, but there ya go.

[@nascompares]

If this is indeed the answer, the thank you!!!!!! Odd that Synology was not able to tell me this though.

[@brianw.4985]

I was thinking of the old gateway PC ads

[@TheProductCritiques]

Hey there, It's really interesting to hear about the whole cow situation with Synology and how it's got you scratching your head. I totally get your curiosity - why a cow, right? It seems like an odd choice, especially when you consider the association with milk and beef. Maybe they were going for a friendly and approachable image, or perhaps there's a deeper connection to their brand story that we're missing. As for the WD Red hard drives, your breakdown of the various options is super informative. It's great to know about the noise levels and the warranty support, which can be crucial factors when choosing the right drive for your NAS setup. And the insight into when one should consider upgrading to Ultrastar drives is valuable. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and knowledge. Keep those informative videos coming! Cheers!

[@vskal]

Got 2 WD Red exchanged for 2 upgraded WD Red PRO's last summer when I built my first NAS. I opened a ticket to WD and they were kind (or guilty) enought to accept my requests. They sent refurbished Red Pro disks but I negotiated a 4 year warranty instead of the 3 of my original purchased drives. The argument of getting an upgrade instead of the normal EFRX replacement could be that the EFAX has a larger cache ! The Red Pro's are not that quiet but indeed at a relatively low frequency.

[@kaya2995]

Great vid as always. But there's a small mistake in the wording. You're speaking correctly of the WD Red HDD but the graphic in the corner says WD Red Plus HDD, where it should show WD Red HDD

[@Ironbuket]

Not a small mistake. It says SMR. After that really long intro about why SMR is bad, he then never mentioned which had CMR and SMR. Many may think they all have SMR by that graphic.

[@dateacha77]

They use a cow because Synology stations are mooooo-ving your data around! ;)

[@ricardorgomez]

Fantastic summary of the WD Red drives. If you're not a techie, it can be a little overwhelming. Let me add a little more with my 30 years of IT support from home-user to mega-corporate environments. I've held hundreds if not thousands of hard drives in my hands to upgrade or replace in systems. WD is worth the extra money. 100% I think 30 years ago, hard drives were pretty much all on equal footing. I really didn't notice a difference in reliability. Then a pattern started to form: WD simply was a better performer for longer periods. Either I or the company would go with most likely Seagate to save cost or give them a try. There would be problems sooner than expected. Then I would avoid them for several years and give them another try. Poor performance. Short lifespan. Failure. Take your pick. I would then wait some more years until trying again. Same issues. I got a feeling Seagate is aware of this mindset of people like me have which is why they offer that data-recovery service for their NAS and DC type drives currently. No thank you. Whenever I hear some complain about WD drives, closer inspection usually reveals someone doing something they shouldn't be doing with that drive. Like dropping a mobile drive down a flight of stairs. Or connecting it in a strange or incorrect way to the computer. Or the worst: they bought the drive 10 years ago and still expect 100% performance. Something like that. Really. Any drive can fail. I've just had the best user-experience with WD and to a slightly lesser extent, Hitachi and Toshiba. Who are all owned by WD now I believe. I just bought a QNAP TS-873 and since that was already a pricey purchase, I was tempted to go with Seagate. I just couldn't. The last thing running through my mind if I was experiencing a drive failure or performance issue is how much money I saved on it.

[@---us7qf]

Thank you for this contribution Ricardo, I was just contemplating getting 4 or 5 Seagate EXOS drives for my first NAS. Now, I will have to do more research, based on what you've said. Thank you. It is always good to hear about the options, as well as arguments for and against.

[@thethirdman225]

15:55 Yeah WD replaced an enclosure after it killed two drives in the space of a couple of months. They were actually pretty good about it.

[@JerryWoo96]

In singapore, the last time i had warranty for a portable wd hdd is by mail in only. For Toshiba, i just send in an email to book an appointment and just walk-in to the distributor where the retailers get their drives from, which means faster turn around time than wd.

[@freddymora7489]

error in on-screen text at minute 7:50 - it should read "red", rather than "Red Plus"

[@namAlexander]

RMA warranty support nails it for me theses days as its less faff, just like corsair support just bought a WD60EFAX on deal just for standard drive storage not nas will see how it goes the last two i bought were the last gen reds and had them 7 years, WD60EFAX runs cooler though

[@relaxingnature2617]

Will Farrell says ..More cow bell ..we need more cow bell

[@blackIce504]

you spoke about Noise the Seagate IronWolf is a higher RPM so yeah i can imagine there would be noise and personally 7200RPM is a better option of NAS.

[@Ironbuket]

Great video. You spent ages talking about SMR and why it was bad and then when you went through the models you never once mentioned which had SMR or not. Are you implying they all are SMR? One source said that WD##EFRX is CMR (Good for NAS) and WD##EFAX is SMR (Bad for NAS). This would imply that at least some of the Red Plus are CMR. Didn’t help that your on-screen graphic at 7:50, when you were talking about the Red non-Plus, said ‘WD Red Plus’ and mentioned SMR but then at 9:06 when you started talking about the Plus series the graphic didn’t mention SMR or CMR.

[@FUG_GOOGL]

I own multiple 10TB Red's (EFAX & AFBX) and they're CMR. Anything up to and including 6TB is SMR is what I've heard.

[@TrevorJackman]

I recently had to rebuild my Synology volume which has a mix of drives, 2 are 6tb Efax smr reds and 2 are 4tb iron wolf drives. While adding the drives DSM now gives a big warning stating that the WD EFAX drives are not compatible with their device. I wonder with the release of DSM 7 will I see these drives getting booted out of the array like in a Drobo box. I would not recommend anyone touch an SMR for NAS, They may be ok for the home user but you could find yourself in trouble after a software update.

[@Mike0193Azul]

Fantastically helpful video 💚

[@nascompares]

Thanks man. You are a gent!

[@paulpoco22]

I did an RMA for a 6TB Red SMR to received a 6TB Red Plus CMR HDD last year. WD let me do an Advance RMA without giving them my Credit Card.

[@patricehenri8172]

Great video but scary for me. I just bought a WD Red 4TB (WD40EFAX - SMR) to put in my Plex home server, an old i7-3770K PC, while waiting to get a real NAS eventually. I was not aware of the WD RED SMR vs CMR situation. I always though a RED is a RED regardless of its suffix (None, Plus, Pro) and is optimized for NAS RAID operation/environment, the no-suffix RED being for non-24/7 light home usage. Now I am not so sure my RED is suitable for NAS RAID 1/5 (or SHM) workload. When I get my NAS (4, 5 or 8 bays), and buy some additional WD CMR RED drives, can I mix them with my 4TB SMR in a RAID 1/5 or SHM configuration? Will I lose my data eventually when a drive fails because the SMR drive does not let me reconstruct the RAID? There are lots of scray stories about those downgraded SMR RED on the net and I would like to know your opinion/recomendation on that.

[@patricehenri8172]

I bought this RED drive because it was dirt cheap on boxing day (79.99$ CA for 4TB), but now I'm starting to doubt my choice maybe I should have get a RED Plus instead for futur NAS usage.

[@user-tc2ky6fg2o]

@@patricehenri8172 WD scared everyone when the turned the simple "Red" to SMR, and introduced the "Plus" as CMR (which was formerly the simple Red 😀 ). The main issue with SMR is the speed. If you use in the same array with CMR, then it slows down the whole array. Better not to mix. A resilvering takes VERY long time on it. SMR is good for "cold" storage or almost just read usage, but not for RAID5 parity.

[@hafengr]

I have a home server for my movies and music that is getting pretty large. I have over 12TB of movie files and nearly 4tb of music. I am running Unraid on a Supermicro sever board. Right now I have a mixture of non enterprise hard drives of many different brands and sizes. I was thinking of heading higher on the chart of quality so I started buying some used 4tb Gold Data Center drives on E-bay. I have purchased two currently and I would like to ask if I am actually doing something worthwhile of should I not be using Data Center Drives in my home server.

[@tlee1157]

Excellent explanation about those different types of hard drive. And their individual designs.

[@Stubchain]

I just setup a Terramaster F2-210 with two Ironwolf 4t drives. It's driving me crazy as the had drives chatter constantly and I can't stop them.

[@ajjumaknojia]

Typo at 7:51, it should be labeled as WD red standard HDD instead of plus right?

[@shahidvalli7853]

Rob you’re a legend

[@valex844]

which is the quietest: - WD Plus CMR ....EZF 4tb (128mb cache) - Ironwolf 4Tb (64 mb cache) Thanks

[@ngocehgayabebas2118]

I dont know

[@FUG_GOOGL]

@@ngocehgayabebas2118 Then why reply???

[@ngocehgayabebas2118]

@@FUG_GOOGL to make you happy

[@FUG_GOOGL]

@@ngocehgayabebas2118 Thanks!

[@benja1378]

​@@FUG_GOOGLwhat's up with the toilet paper on the bottom half of your profile pic? :)

[@jorgemtds]

The merchandising company from they procured the gifts... only had cows available... 😂

[@compudude]

Slightly older video, but I'll make one note: You call out WD's customer service and speed of returning drives for "Enterprise" users using enterprise-class drives. Good CS speed is *always* appreciated, BUT the speed of a refund is generally far more important to a consumer end user (arguably your main target audience anyway, I'd admit), than actual Enterprise users. In an Enterprise environment, we just order a replacement so we can get things fixed NOW, and sort out the warranty issues later.

[@henningplueschke8298]

Great post! Very helpful. Thank you

[@josepessoa8543]

I'm planning to buy a Synology DS220+ to be used as a media server (music) with 2 x HDD 8TB (Raid 1 configuration). Which disks would you prefer (the NAS will be in the same room as the HIFI system, therefore low noise is better)? WD Red WD Red Pro Seagate Ironwolf Seagate Ironwolf Pro

[@tonybove2468]

So we still can't use the Plus drives in RAID arrays, or has that changed?

[@carpii]

is it more performant to populate an 8 bay NAS with 8 smaller drives, vs just filling a couple of bays with larger ones (assuming the same drive tech and rpm)?

[@bartbroekhuizen5617]

Got my WD Reds 4TB running for like 10 years already in my QNAP TS412. They are worth every penny. But now its time to upgrade, im still in doubt taking the WD Red Plus or the WD Red Ultrastar, because of the noise i needed to rule out the WD Red Pro's. Any advice WD Red Plus or Ultrastar?

[@pr0jectSkyneT]

Ultrastar always. Better overall quality, performance, and reliability workload rating at 550TB/year.

[@TheHillsHaveFPV]

why does BigTreeTech put rubber duckies in all of their boxes?

[@ausguy4385]

My local Bank has that as they sponsor the local state show... so was likely ment to look like the cows but was just ready made merch.

[@antondjayzakov4776]

Great review 😀 Thank you

[@abdullahtiry6394]

Please can you recommend a reliable 18TB HDD that will last for long time. PC is room and its very quiet (noctua nf-a14-pwm fans @450rpm idle) PC specs: Asus x570 Dark hero, 32gb ram 3600mhz, amd 5900x cpu

[@robbrown2789]

Tucows used to send cows them to their resellers - and did the same thing in the 90's/2000's - they prob just jumped on the band wagon.

[@savagex9000]

I googled wd red I saw not for raid or something NO RAID is this true? I was thinking of getting wd red and setup raid at home.

[@normanrobson9957]

I’ve had WD Red 3TB harddisks working 24/7 in my Synology diskstation sinde 2013. I bought 2 Toshiba N300 4 TB for my OWC 2 bay raid enclosure and they are so noisy compared to the WD drives. I’ll never but them again it’ll be WD Red for me every time. I’d like to ask a question, can I install a WD Red in an enclosure to use as an external hard disk or should they only be installed in a NAS?

[@FUG_GOOGL]

You can install them in an enclosure or even as a regular drive in your PC. They are optimized for NAS but work absolutely flawless as standalone drives as well. Source: I have 4x 10TB Red's in my PC :)

[@macmund]

Cash Cow icon?

[@flytyme]

Because Synology MOOOves data!

[@stevemccollum2011]

In Mandrian the word for Cattle and the word for Hard drive sound almost the same that is the reason If you believe that I have some ocean view property in Nevada to sell you

[@DavidM2002]

Mandarin ?

[@JerryWoo96]

So... Red Plus 5400rpm is SMR Red Plus 7200rpm is CMR Is this correct?

[@JerryWoo96]

Or did he label wrongly?

[@JerryWoo96]

Other than serial numbers, are there any other obvious indicating factors on the label which states which are smr and which are cmr?

[@FUG_GOOGL]

@@JerryWoo96 6TB is CMR.

[@ianparkin5345]

Can I mix WD Red & WD Red Plus in raid in a Qnap Nas?

[@FUG_GOOGL]

Yes, no problem.

[@AsadAttilyMADSAD]

thank you

[@RufianoMalaka]

The sounds coming from cows mouth while eating grass is same like nas sound

[@Robotrik1]

Can I use a Red drive as a normal HDD ?

[@nascompares]

Yes, but it will be a bit overkill. You can easy use a standard WD Blue or Barracuda. Use a WD Black if you feel flush!

[@Robotrik1]

@@nascompares -- Thanks for the reply . I'm looking to do a two copy backup of family recordings, and looking at the HDD market, in terms of capacity VS price VS space lost after formatting -- the 6-8TB WD red and purple ones seem to have been the most cost-effective , which is why I asked if the red one also doubles as a regular HDD . Thanks again!

[@peterhambrook3757]

Milton Keynes is famous for its concrete cows.

[@marcin_karwinski]

I guess it's Synology's way to admit their products are cash cows ;)

[@lest0328]

About the cow. It has four stomacshs

[@jayone8891]

Cows get milked, so does plex, which is run on synology

[@burakozc3079]

It represents human intelligence.

[@diddliewinks3486]

this made me not want to buy WD. but then i realized i had no other choice.... cause fuck seagate for life.

[@fredashay]

Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!

[@user-nu5ib2ri9o]

COW = copy on write.

[@4Nanook]

No offense but you are full of bull-poo-poo, SMR does swell in NAS applications because when you have to rebuild a drive it's going to write sequentially so data isn't being re-written and re-organized and thus SMR does just fine.

[@nascompares]

And what about systems that do not give sufficient idle/low time to allow SMR disks to sort the data/platter allocation out before a failed drive caused RAID degradation, whilst at high capacity utilization? Sounds like a recipe for disaster and one that is not exactly 'low numbers of probability '?

[@MRForever-ub5pw]

Why a cow? Maybe like a cow, their drives stink? Or maybe it's utterly ridiculous to buy their drives? Just a thought. LOL

[@shahidvalli7853]

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

[@miguelzinhorama]

cow = COPY-ON-WRITE an btrfs and other file systems method to redundantly save data

[@heh2k]

It has nothing to do with redundancy, it's for atomicy.