WD Red 10TB NAS Hard Disk Drive – 5400 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s 256MB Cache 3.5 Inch – WD100EFAX

Overall Review: I’m an experienced IT guy and was beyond disappointed to have both my 10TB red drives be defective out of the box. If you read Yaniv D’s review from 1/21/2020 he had the same experience I did. But he was lucky to get his failed drive replaced by Newegg. Still, even his replacement was also DOA! His drives were made in November 2019 and so were mine. There are also similar reviews elsewhere and outrage on various forums of people having defective Red 8TB and 10TB drives all made around this time. It’s not just me.

So you would think Western Digital would acknowledge they had an unusual problem and take care of those affected? You would be wrong. Instead. for the honor of paying out of pocket for shipping and insurance to send their brand new defective drives back, in a leisurely 7 to 10 days from when they receive them, Western Digital will send you re-certified (i.e. used) replacement drives. So the total time might be as long as 3 weeks and the replacement drives are likely to have issues or die an early death.

So I pay to send them brand new defective unused drives, and they send me back drives that likely have had issues, been tossed into multiple vehicles around the country several times back and forth, and someone spent perhaps 30 seconds deciding they seem OK to send out as warranty replacements. How is that decent customer support?

I just spent a total of an hour on the phone with WD support (outsourced to India) and got nowhere. After massive times on hold multiple times, my call being disconnected, going around in circles explaining the drives don’t work at all and have never worked, wanting me to run diagnostics that won’t run, all they would say is it’s Western Digital policy to only send out re-certified drives and for the customer to pay shipping costs. They did tell me to be sure and back up my data before returning them despite explaining a dozen times they’ve never worked (so they can’t possibly have data on them).

If you buy these unreliable drives from this sad company I strongly suggest making sure you thoroughly test them within Newegg’s 30 day replacement window otherwise you can end up in the same situation I’m in and you won’t be happy. Western Digital’s support, and quality control, is horrible. If someone at Western Digital wants to change my mind by making things right I’ll update this review.

Pros: – Extreme amount of space (but not a full 10TB or course, more like 9.1 with the difference between 2^10 and 10^3 size)
– Fairly quiet
– Fastest spinning rust drive I’ve ever owned

Cons: – Vibrates a bit more than the 4TB Red it replaced; I may need to use rubber mounts or cradle, etc to eliminate the vibration

Overall Review: Would definitely recommend again, but I will be keeping track of the vibration over the next few months. Hopefully it’s only the design, and not an indication of premature failure. I won’t subtract an egg for it, since I’ve owned drives in the past that vibrated *much* worse, and never gave any problems.

Pros: – Huge Capacity: 10 TB in 3.5″, I wouldn’t have dreamed about that a couple of years ago
– Very good write and read capacity
– Lower write capacity on small files but not an issue.
– WD Red Quality so far

Cons: – Weight
– Runs hotter than usual due to so many platter stuck in it.
– Price (highest $$/TB)

Overall Review: – Got two of them and put in a software RAID 1, works like a charm.
– We’ll see about the reliability of those drives in the long run, concerned about having 7 platters.

Pros: Large Capacity, new lower price, NAS drive, low power usage for capacity.
Hard drive Speed Compare: All testing was done with an external enclosure using CrystalDiskMark and a direct file copy (about 4GB) to the disk from an internal SSD.
WD Red 10TB WD100EFRX-68EUZN0: Seq Read: 207 MB/s, Seq Write 120 MB/s, Copy 186 MB/s
WD Red 3TB WDEFRX-68EUZN0: Seq Read 135 MB/s, Seq Write 128 MB/s, Copy N/A : NAS3.0
WD Red 6TB WD60EFRX-68L0BN1: Seq Read 182 Mb/s, Seq Write 130 MB/s, Copy 174 MB/s : NAS3.0
WD Red 4TB WD40EFRX-68WT0N0: Seq Read 147 MB/s, Seq Write 105 MB/s, Copy 144 MB/s : NAS2.0
WD Green 2TB WD20EARS-07MVWB0: Seq Read 57 MB/s, Seq Write 77 MB/s, Copy 97 MB/s : Sata II
Speed comparison for reference. I have recently tested all of my hard drives that are not hooked up in Raids. This is just a small selection.

Cons: Still relatively expensive. Helium drives still new to the market.

Overall Review: I purchased the WD Red 10TB drives for a 1819+ NAS system. They have been installed for about a month now without any issues.
WD is my go to brand for HDD’s. I’ve been using them as my primary brand for 12 years now. My oldest working hard drives are WD.
As I have the 10TB drive in a NAS system I am unable to get true read/write speeds. I know over GbE Lan the NAS achieved 100Mb/s write speeds, which is similar to USB3.0/3.1Gen1. So the drives do not slow anything down.
My only concerns for the new Helium filled HDDs is how long they will last, gas leaking out slowly over time. The drives with helium are too new to the market to have any real studies yet.

Pros: Happy with the 4 that I ordered and so far they are working in my Synology DS918+ with no issues. I was concerned with having a DOA with an order of 4 and dented shipping box but on the inside, each drive was packed in its own box/support with no damage.

Cons: Non at the moment, working like a normal large drive.

Overall Review: Raid is built, loading them up and will report back if anything fails within the next few months.

Pros: – Large Capacity, one of the biggest available
– Good Cost per GB
– Very, Very Quiet

Cons: None really. What it does do, it does well.

Overall Review: I’m using this drive as a normal desktop drive, and not for RAID/NAS. The first drive I received had a problem out of the box and failed to format. I have Newegg Premier and the drive was replaced quickly and with no fees. The replacement drive runs perfectly so far.

I have this drive in a Shuttle SFF case that sits just 2 feet away from me on the top of my desk to the left of my monitor. I previously had a Toshiba X300 8TB drive – which was faster, but very loud and ‘crunchy’. My work space is very very quiet. The WD Red 10TB is virtually silent, and I am happy about that. I don’t feel any real-world performance difference from the 7200 RPM Toshiba, they both spun up/down when inactive. (the OS is on a NVMe SSD) Currently I have about 6TB of files on it, and I expect that to grow over time so the capacity is welcome. The cost per TB was competitive with 6/8TB drives.

Pros: Quiet
Reasonable xfer rate
Lots of room

Cons: None so far

Overall Review: I put 2 of these 10TB into a Synology DS218+ NAS (RAID 1) to host my Plex libraries and run the Plex app, it runs like a charm. I have 3 smart tv’s, my home pc and my work pc drawing off the same Plex and it handles it quite nicely. Quiet, fast and lots of room. I am upgrading to a 918 and 2 more of these drives soon since I need more space already.

Pros: WD reputation for reliability, huge capacity and they run quiet and cool. What more can you want?

Cons: Nothing

Overall Review: I’ve been using WD Red 4TB drives in my 24/7 Raid1 array for almost two years with no disk failures or any other problems. I needed more space so I bought the largest WD Red drives available. So far they have been perfect but as always only time will tell. But I’ve been using WD drives exclusively since my first computer many years ago and I’ve never had a HD failure so I expect these to be no different. That’s why I bought them.