Western Digital 10TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD – 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5″ – WD101EFBX

Well-performing drive and not too noisy, but make sure to avoid OEM/grey-market units
I bought two units of the 20TB version of this WD Red Pro drive for my new storage system. I particularly went with the 20TB version, because – according to the datasheet on Western Digital’s website – it is less noisy than some of the lower capacity models.I tested one of the units, not in my storage system, but in my open bench USB 3.0 to SATA Adapter (with a max transfer rate of over 500MBps). It performed well, the sequential read and write speeds as high as ca. 270 MBps and ca. 130 MBps on the low-side. This is typical of all HDDs: on the outside of the drive they can pack more data on one track than on the inside, so on each rotation they can write and read more data on the outside area of each disk platter. The write and read tests were also successful, no bad blocks were reported. For some performance figures, please see the attached screenshots (which have the serial number removed/redacted). Please note that the CrystalDiskMark results are performed on an empty HDD, so they seem to be executed in the “fast” section of the drive. The other graphs were taken from HDSentinel, relevant there are the bottom graphs, which show transfer rates across the surface of the drive.The sound of my test unit was also pleasant enough, the clicking wasn’t too bothersome. But since I will move this drive into the case of my storage system very soon, the clicking will be a lot less noticeable than it is already.One action I always perform, BEFORE opening the product box of an HDD or SDD is to check the serial number on the box against the manufacturer’s warranty website to ensure that the item is covered by the manufacturer’s warranty. I do this both when amazon is the seller and when a 3rd party is the seller and amazon is just the fulfillment party. (I do not buy HDDs from a 3rd party seller that does not have fulfillment with amazon.) This is to avoid OEM/gray-market units that aren’t covered by the manufacturer’s warranty. A store warranty by a 3rd party seller is of no use to me, since these sellers come and go and I also don’t want the hassle of dealing with them. Since the Red Pro series offers a manufacturer’s warranty of 5 years, and HDDs fail frequently enough to make such a warranty very valuable, I always insist getting the manufacturer’s warranty and even will query 3rd party sellers, if their stock with amazon is covered by such a warranty.As it turned out, the serial number of second 20TB HDD that I ordered (from a 3rd party seller, since amazon themselves were out of stock) did not show up in the manufacturer’s database for U.S. warranty, so I can only assume that it is a gray-market unit and I immediately returned it. (I can only hope that the 3rd party seller will have to bear the full cost of this return, since I emailed them and asked about the manufacturer’s warranty, before the item ever shipped, but they didn’t answer my question.)One more tip: There has been some research that failure rates of HDDs from the same batch are somewhat correlated, so I always try to space out my purchases (either in time or by using different vendors) to increase the chance that I will be getting units from different batches. That’s why I bought from two different 3rd party sellers on amazon (one of which apparently sold a grey-market unit), without disclosing that fact ahead of time.

Reliable and good performance
I’ve purchased six of these this year and they’re all running fine with no problems whatsoever. The CMR drives perform better than the (deceptively mislabeled) SMR drives they replaced. I believe these are not helium filled, so they should last longer than the higher-capacity drives that are. I like the five-year warranty on the Red Pro drives, so I’ve been buying lots of them for the past decade or so. There has been some odd price fluctuation with these, with them starting out below $300 each, and rising sharply through the year. Normally, IT products decline in price over time, so I can only assume that this was caused by high demand.

Todo de acuerdo a lo esperado, hasta ahora trabajando sin problemas y llegó mucho mejor empaquetado que los que envía directamente Amazon, últimamente Amazon envía los discos duros en sobre con prácticamente nada de protección más que las pequeñas burbujas que trae el interior del sobre, no he tenido problemas tampoco y no me preocupa tanto por la excelente política de devoluciones de Amazon pero definitivamente no es la mejor forma de empaquetar un disco duro, en este caso el disco llegó en caja con algo de protección extra, se agradece.

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