RAID Ready: WD Red hard drives are engineered with RAID error recovery control to help reduce failures within multi-bay NAS systems, unlike most desktop drives that are configured for generic use. Use this modified string, for example "HUH7280??ALE60?" to search for model name in the tables below. Any capacity drive is from the same family as the found model name and all the fields from the found table row are valid for it, meaning HUH728060ALE601(6TB) and HUH728080ALE600(8TB) are from the same family. Not just any drive will do. Get up to 48TB of capacity in your 8-bay system and with WD’s exclusive NASware 3.0 technology, you can optimize each and every drive. Built into every WD Red™ hard drive, NASware 3.0’s advanced technology improves your system’s storage performance by increasing compatibility, integration, upgradeability, and reliability. If your drive follows WDC model naming convention, then first you would have to take all the letters and numbers after the dash, for example WD40EFRX-68L0BN1 would transform to 68L0BN1.

Ideal for Home Offices, Power Users, Small to Medium Businesses and Consumer/Commercial NAS systems

I have 2TB, 4TB and 6TB drives. If a drive fails, which tends to be one of the older 2TB drives I have replaced it with one of these 6TB drives. if you are still going around in circles and need direct consultation, we have just started providing one-hour consultations via zoom. You can find out more about them via the link below: Im at a bit of a crossroads here and was hoping for some advice. Right now there is only about 3tb of data on the entire nas while it reshapes. But i had about 5tb more ready to load onto the nas soon as it was going to complete. My initial thought was to buy another older WD60EFRX and soon as the raid reshape was completed I would pull the newer SMR drive and put in the WD60EFRX and let the system repair. These are my drives of choice currently. They are purely for data as I use SSDs for the operating system. Then modify this short model name, replacing first two characters and the very last one with "?", for example 68L0BN1 would become ??L0BN?.

SuperMicro X11SSH-F, Intel E3-1225 v6 (Plex hw transcode broken); 64 GiB (4x16) Crucial/SuperMicro ECC DDR4 UDIMM It is important to choose a drive purpose-built for RAID-optimized NAS systems to ensure optimum performance and preserve your valuable data. Take the following into consideration when choosing a hard drive for your NAS: WDC naming convention: all model names in this naming convention start with letters "WD", WDC full model name would aslo have a dash, for example WD60EFRX-68L0BN1. Introducing the innovative Western Digital WD60EFRX-68L0BN1 desktop hard drive, designed to provide unmatched reliability and outstanding performance. With an impressive 6TB capacity, it offers an abundance of space to store your valuable data, media files, and important documents securely. Enjoy fast data access and transfer speeds with its exceptional 5400RPM rotation per minute, ensuring efficient and seamless operations. The SATA interface guarantees seamless connectivity and compatibility with various devices. This 3.5-inch device is easy to install in any desktop setup thanks to its sleek and compact design. It is also highly reliable, durable, and performs exceptionally well, making it a great choice for all your storage needs. Capacity:Western Digital’s exclusive NASware™ technology fine tunes drive parameters to match NAS system workloads which helps increase performance and reliability. The table above lists the WD drives that come with SMR technology and the drives that use the faster conventional magnetic recording (CMR). Importantly, the blog states, "...Thank you for letting us know how we can do better. We will update our marketing materials, as well as provide more information about SMR technology, including benchmarks and ideal use cases." Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology helps hard drive manufacturers to produce HDDs with larger capacity. As I write this I can see a pile of 9 similar hard discs, all made by Seagate or one of their badge engineered names. They are all faulty and in under 4 years. Two 5 year warranty Seagate drives failed but were replaced under warranty. Also on the pile there are two WD discs, one was over 7 years old and the other almost 10 years old when they failed. We have 20+ WD disks in use, mostly in NAS units running RAID and on 24/7 and the last two remaining Seagate units which I would only ever use in a RAID array as I don't trust them. This is a review of a WD disc, so I expect it to last well beyond its warranty period and would recommend to all SMR does result in lower performance, but it enables cost savings that are attractive to some users, and if used in the correct types of workloads, those savings are worth the exchange of gaining access to deeper capacity. However, using SMR tech for desktop and laptop boot drives will likely remain a topic open for debate, as their underwhelming performance in sustained random write workloads could hamper performance in standard operating systems.

The local distributor did not have WD60EFRX available and offered me a RED WD60EFAX at the same price which was supposed to be the same, newer, but a bit better - more cache. The logic was it wont be any better in your NAS but it wont be any worse. These new drives seem to be an upgraded version of their older CMR drives that used the same recording technology. When they silently replaced CMR with SMR drives they had more cache available. Now they have matched the cache size with their SMR drives. In a RAID situation, you will not benefit from this cache since all data is written randomly across many drives. But it is interesting that their speed has been increased from around 150 to 170 MB/s. If you have older drives that are slower you will not benefit from this. But if you have a new NAS then certainly choosing these faster drives would theoretically improve NAS speeds. In the existing setup, the speed will be as fast as the slowest link in the chain. If you connect via 1GbE LAN then you will not notice a speed difference anyway. WD60EFRX Western Digital 3.5″ hard drive with a storage capacity of 6TB and featuring a SATA interface. WD60EFRX Western Digital Red 6TB 5400RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-inch Hard Drive. Despite being new these drives may have very slight scratches, this is because they were opened for a job but were never used. The drive pictured is a sample of one of these drives. They are like new. You would notice that some characters in the model names in the tables below are replaced with "?". "?" - means any character.

Compatibility: Unlike desktop drives, WD Red hard drives are specifically designed and tested for NAS and include NASware™ technology which fine tunes drive parameters to match NAS system workloads for optimum performance.