Western Digital 16TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5 - WD161KFGX

These took under a minute each to install into my Synology DS920+ NAS. Since it was all new gear, I let it do a through drive check as part of initializing which took a long time. I think it may ave been about two days. In theory, I could have used it during this time, but I just started it and ignored it. During installation, the 920 whines about any accessories (memory, drives) that arent Synologys own and that included these. On the 922, they change from whining to much more obnoxious contrived incompatibilities, but this combination was chosen because exactly once, during insteallation, it warns you that its not a supported combination and thats that. Probably if there were a support issue involving data loss, theyd remind you of that oath you took to not complain, but in reality this is a very common combination that works quite well. Fan and normal noise is quite minimal. There was a noticeable clunk during a head seek. I reduced this by offlining the unit so I could remove power then applying the fuzzy half of a hook-and-loop fastener to the bottom of the bottom rail. That gave it support and a little bit of padding so the metal cage didnt serve as a drum skin for the oh-so-tiny motion that got amplified when transferred to the sheet metal. Im looking forward to getting many, many years from these drives, like I did from the 4TB WD these are replacing. Those drives have no reading errors. Size grows and no drives are infallible, so I opted to replace them on my schedule (OK, and on Amazon Day special. :-) ) instead of letting the drive pick its own replacement day, taking my data with it.

you can count on them in your NAS.

I generally have nothing bad to say about WD drives. I still have 8 2nd gen WD Red drives from 2012 running. Have not tested for errors, but last I checked they were fine. My WD Black drives reached over 35,000 hours before reporting bad sectors- they still survived to transfer my data and rebuild the array. These are my first purchase of the latest generation NAS drive and I hope they do as well as my former WD black. I will continue to replace failing black drives from 2011 with these Red Pro as needed. Hopefully prices will start coming down within the next year or two.

Its huge and reliable. Plugged into my 120tb array like expected and ran a unRAID preclear like a champ. Now its humming along in my unRAID array

Bought two of these for a mirrored data partition setup in a server. Within maybe 15 minutes they were running noticeably warm and within an hour they were both running hot enough that it was painful to try to keep your hand up against the side of them for more than maybe 10-15 seconds. Shipped and sold by Amazon btw - just cause others had mentioned issues with drives sold by third party sellers. My only other experience with Western Digital 10TB drives was with an external drive (not sure if it was a red drive inside it but....) that failed a little under a year so Im not optimistic about these but they were what was available when we needed them. 4 stars because even though theyre working now, I think that at some point were going to have to swap these drives out even if they dont fail just because of the fact that the whole rig is running that much hotter because of these little branding irons. Thats going to be a pain and take hours of downtime to transfer the data - all of which I wouldnt have to deal with if these ran cooler like they shouldve out of the box. Not sure if they just arent made to handle RAID 1. Ill update the review when/if something fails. Fingers crossed.

The drive is louder than I would like. I tend to have a fan running most of the time, so I dont really notice, but when I dont it makes clickity access sound, nearly constantly. Sometimes it seems to never stop. It is not broken, just on the noisy side. My last internal was not like this, so I am a bit surprised that it sounds a bit...loud.

Recently an old raid system failed me and one drive went with it. Decided to replace it all with these new variant Red Pros in 4TB model. I received drives all dated late January 2023.. it is only March so they are minty fresh. My previous 4TB red drives from 2014 would write at around 145MB/s. These new pro versions write at around 245-250MB/s (larger video files). Massive improvement for archive and backup purposes. Drives are also SILENT. I have a test unit running next to me and I cant even hear it while it writes, in an open docking station. So far, very impressed.

I purchased a pair of these on Black Friday 2021 well in advance of when I would actually need to use them. They sat on my shelf unopened in their original boxes for over 3 months. When I went to install and use them, one drive was OK. (I have a pair of media servers with 24 large drives in them) The other drive was riddled with errors, would not format and made any machine it was connected to unstable. This is a BRAND NEW DRIVE WITH ZERO HOURS ON IT!!! Because of my own stupidity I did not test them when I got them. Now for that mistake I can only get my new drive replaced with a used refurbished drive. It gets worse. I have had TREMENDOUS trouble getting into my Western Digital account and receiving information from Western Digital. I guess Western Digital is an Indian or Pakistan company. I cannot understand these people. I have spent days and days and more days on the phone just trying to get an RMA. I sent the drive to California where it was received and has sat for 4 weeks. Western Digital does not even show they received my drive yet and that they are still waiting for it. I called them on the phone and they looked it up and promised to update things. Nothing has happened in a further 2 weeks. It is my conclusion that Western Digital warranties are worthless. I wasted $400 on one of drives and the alternative drive company is even worst than this.

This 14 TB drive is 12.7 TB formatted in Windows. These drives are great. I also have a 8 TB (7.27 TB in Windows) version that is still going strong after 2.5 years running 24/7.

I have a home lab with a NAS thats central for most things running. Last fall I realized the old disks were passing 8 years of total run time (and less than 50 Power On cycles) and not only were the old drives showing their age as in lacking good cache but I figured it wouldnt be too far off into the future before the drives would fail, so I started to replace the drives. Same housing, same hardware (Except for the disk) same software - once data was migrated over, nobody would be able to tell the difference except the newer disks were faster. And I was pretty happy - that is until last week. This disk was D-E-A-D - a ton of read errors, and no way to even send a command to the drive. I removed the drive and started testing it, to look at SMART data finding a looong list of errors (192) and a Raw Read Error Rate sky high (almost 500K). The log is showing failures even at PowerOn - its as if the drive is having a hard time talking back to the controller. The drive gets EXTREMELY hot being powered on for just a few minutes. So this is going the way of RMAs once WD gets back to me. Had I written this review a month ago it would be full 5 stars and never had a problem kind of review. Having replaced 4 drives with a very long run time without major issues this is a bummer. It happens - sometimes a drive is just bad, except in this case WD added to my frustration with a web-site that would not initiate an RMA for me.