--- product_id: 431655 title: "2TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 64 MB Cache, 3.5\" - WD20EFRX" brand: "western digital" price: "1452.49 DT" currency: TND in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 category: "Western Digital" url: https://www.desertcart.tn/products/431655-2tb-wd-red-plus-nas-internal-hard-drive-hdd-5400 store_origin: TN region: Tunisia --- # 5400 RPM optimized for quiet, efficient NAS use 2TB capacity for massive storage SATA 6 Gb/s interface for fast data transfer 2TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD20EFRX **Brand:** western digital **Price:** 1452.49 DT **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Summary > 💼 Elevate your NAS game with WD Red Plus — storage that works as hard as you do! ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** 2TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD20EFRX by western digital - **How much does it cost?** 1452.49 DT with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.tn](https://www.desertcart.tn/products/431655-2tb-wd-red-plus-nas-internal-hard-drive-hdd-5400) ## Best For - western digital enthusiasts ## Why This Product - Trusted western digital brand quality - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Key Features - • **Massive 2TB Capacity:** Store and share your critical business and personal data without compromise. - • **Peace of Mind Warranty:** Backed by a 3-year limited warranty and trusted Western Digital reliability to keep your data safe. - • **Optimized for Endurance:** Supports up to 180TB/year workload—built to handle heavy, continuous data flow. - • **Reliable NAS-Grade Storage:** Engineered with NASware firmware and CMR tech for seamless 24/7 multi-bay NAS performance. - • **Efficient & Quiet Operation:** 5400 RPM rotational speed balances power efficiency with reliable access times, minimizing noise in your workspace. ## Overview The Western Digital 2TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive is a 3.5-inch SATA 6 Gb/s mechanical HDD designed specifically for small to medium business NAS environments. Featuring 5400 RPM speed, 64MB cache, and CMR technology, it delivers reliable, efficient, and quiet performance optimized for multi-bay NAS systems with workloads up to 180TB/year. Its NASware firmware ensures compatibility and durability in 24/7 operation, backed by a 3-year limited warranty. ## Description Packed with power to handle the small- to medium-sized business NAS environments and increased workloads for SOHO customers, WD Red Plus is ideal for archiving and sharing, as well as RAID array rebuilding on systems using ZFS and other file systems. Built and tested for up to 8-bay NAS systems, these drives give you the flexibility, versatility, and confidence in storing and sharing your precious home and work files. Review: Great drives - Let's get this out of the way first, I'm kind of a WD fanboy but with good reason I think. I've been using them for as long as I can remember, and maybe it's just my personal luck but I think they've been better to me than any other brand. The only ones I don't really like are the Green drives, and I'm willing to accept that they are perfectly fine as external drives that aren't being constantly accessed. The Green is in mega power saving mode and loves to spin down, which means you're looking at longer access times and more wear and tear if you leave it plugged in and access it frequently. I wanted to punch my monitor every time I waited the magical 5 minutes (or whatever it is) before clicking on what I needed, just to wait several seconds on the drive to spin back up. I don't currently use NAS or RAID but considering my options this seemed like my best bet for frequently accessed mass storage, and I was at one point considering RAID (still am kind of). Black is "better," faster, and as such costs more, but I couldn't justify it since I have an SSD for things that need to be fast. I bought this 4TB Red to put in my computer and replace a 3TB Green external drive I was using. I've had it since August of 2014 which isn't that long at this point but it's given me zero reason to complain, same as the 3TB Red I bought in October to replace a 1TB Blue. The only thing I've noticed that was cause for concern at first is these things seem to be a little louder than your standard WD Blue or Green drive on read and write operations, and I thought I may have gotten one with a defect. I'm not sure why that is, but I was much less concerned about it when I got the second drive and it sounded about the same. They seem to have quietened down some with use, and again they have given me no issues whatsoever. I'll definitely be buying more of these when the time comes. UPDATE 6/30/2015 Just wanted to say I am still running a 4tb and a 3tb WD Red in my computer and they've been absolutely trouble free. One of them seems to make a short quiet buzzing noise every now and then that sounds out of place if you're used to diagnosing bad drives by sound like I've had to do on many occasions, but every test I've run comes up clean and I've had no issues whatsoever out of either drive. Chkdsk, SMART, and benchmarks are clean and consistent and I use these daily as "secondary" drives for all my storage and most of my games. I really can't recommend these highly enough. That being said, I always feel the need to tell people KEEP BACKUPS. Any drive can fail and it's always painful when it happens if you don't have regular backups. It's not cheap to match storage space for backups but trust me... That one day you need it -- and you will one day or one year unless you replace your drives regularly -- it's money well spent. Review: Best storage drive , NAS not required + professional Q & A podcast addressing RED drives | a great youtube video | - I have been a long term western digital customer for over 10yrs. This drive is aimed and marketed at NAS type devices however also very good in a regular desktop computer system as a storage drive, which is how I am currently using it for my personal desktop system . I have owned this red drive for approx. 10 days now. The sustained transfer speed is very good. the lower / variable spindle speed compared to normal 7200RPM drives doesn't impact its performance for my use . It performs better then my 4TB WD green drive. My Red drive was installed in a computer with many hard drives and it runs at a cool 84F (29 C ) at idle, the lowest temp. drive in the computer. Also according to the Red drive spec sheet uses the least amount of power as well. Time limited error recovery (TLER) is one of the benefits for the Red drives , outlined in the youtube video podcast below. A popular weekly hardware video podcast with storage editor at PC Perspective ( pcper) Allyn Malventano addressing uses of red model drives: https://youtu.be/WjjCMWZ0aDU?t=51m I included a start time for later in the podcast @ 51 minutes, the start of discussion of WD red drives and its use in NAS and non NAS systems Some valuable info on NAS / RAID design can be found in this video as well. plus other general server hardware info is addressed. At time 55:40 in the the video more info and insight regarding DIY home NAS and RAID stability, reliability and design is discussed as well. Potentially saving a DIY person some pretty decent cash and at least some calories reading conflicting information online. All of which for some buyers reading reviews on desertcart for this product would find useful or at least interesting. For me, my drives in my personal computer for this review are used for pure storage via Linux based operating systems. In some computer systems i've built are media servers, again using linux with LVM and sometimes MDADM , other times using RAID cards such as IBM M1015 , a cheaper version, of more expensive promise model cards with SAS. HGST is another maker of hard drives with good reputation and within the same general price range for some of their models, however western digital now owns them, formally Hitachi Global Storage Technologies . I've not taken the time while writing this to check if HGST drives feature some of the features the Red model line up offers. If you are going for a gaming system drive or require heavy I/O for a operating system drive, the red of course wouldn't be your best option. I use a WD Black drive, # WD3003FZEX for this . Steam games fill a drive quickly. With my budget and limited sata ports it makes a SSD fairly useless for storing games , or a media server gaming rig combo. Most of the time, once game is loaded , its mostly done , leaving the CPU and GPU left doing the work... . so for my needs esp dual booting , gaming on linux and windows using a Black model drive is my best option for my hardware , storage and requirements to have one type of operating system running most of the time. I do sometimes run Linux on a stand alone 120GB SSD , if I disconnect my optical drive , smaller ssd drives are quite inexpensive now and do make life a bit easier esp on aging desktop hardware. The cost per TB in a black model is still quite low for the performance level and the only high performance drive to offer a 5 year warranty standard. Especially when compared to a hybrid model drives cost and other drive makers of fast mechanical and hybrid solutions. Heavy gaming via steam would make a hybrid drives nand cache not very effective , fairly quickly iirc . Hopefully some of this info will prove useful , or at least give some starting ground to look into , research options deeper that may not have been considered before. ## Features - Available in capacities ranging from 1-14TB with support for up to 8 bays - 5400RPM performance class - Supports up to 180 TB/yr workload rate*| * Workload Rate is defined as the amount of user data transferred to or from the hard drive. Workload Rate is annualized (TB transferred ✕ (8760 / recorded power-on hours)) - NASware firmware for compatibility - Small or medium business NAS systems in a 24x7 environment - 3-year limited warranty - This model uses CMR technology and is being renamed “WD Red Plus” to distinguish it from the current “WD Red” product, which uses SMR technology - During this transition period, WD Red Plus devices may be delivered with a ”WD Red” label, but rest assured the device you are receiving will be the CMR-version of WD Red and can be confirmed by the model number ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | ASIN | B008JJLZ7G | | Additional Features | Data Recovery Service | | Best Sellers Rank | #22 in Internal Hard Drives | | Brand | Western Digital | | Cache Memory Installed Size | 64 | | Color | Red | | Compatible Devices | NASware firmware (PC; Mac ) | | Connectivity Technology | SATA | | Customer Reviews | 4.5 out of 5 stars 24,316 Reviews | | Data Transfer Rate | 215 Megabits Per Second | | Digital Storage Capacity | 2 TB | | Enclosure Material | Aluminum | | Form Factor | 3.5-inch | | Global Trade Identification Number | 07330381397523, 08809321846036 | | Hard Disk Description | Mechanical Hard Disk | | Hard Disk Form Factor | 3.5 Inches | | Hard Disk Interface | Serial ATA-600 | | Hard Disk Rotational Speed | 5400 RPM | | Hard-Drive Size | 2 TB | | Hardware Connectivity | SATA 6.0 Gb/s | | Hardware Platform | PC; Mac | | Installation Type | Internal Hard Drive | | Item Weight | 600 Grams | | Manufacturer | Western Digital | | Mfr Part Number | 8809321846036 | | Model Name | Red | | Model Number | AU-44LB-F32X | | Number of Items | 1 | | Special Feature | Data Recovery Service | | Specific Uses For Product | Personal | | UPC | 722076537906 734646399937 726407826851 163120542888 012300418942 012304983897 012304314158 809190588530 608729689508 191120098029 809387573196 | | Unit Count | 1.0 Count | | Warranty Description | 3-year manufacturer limited warranty | ## Product Details - **Brand:** Western Digital - **Color:** Red - **Compatible Devices:** NASware firmware (PC; Mac ) - **Connectivity Technology:** SATA - **Digital Storage Capacity:** 2 TB - **Hard Disk Description:** Mechanical Hard Disk - **Hard Disk Form Factor:** 3.5 Inches - **Hard Disk Interface:** Serial ATA-600 - **Installation Type:** Internal Hard Drive - **Special Feature:** Data Recovery Service ## Images ![2TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD20EFRX - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71Z8kfqA8GL.jpg) ![2TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD20EFRX - Image 2](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71xWxEdSLsL.jpg) ![2TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD20EFRX - Image 3](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81j3R1Bs4SL.jpg) ![2TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD20EFRX - Image 4](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/813O9B7PBUL.jpg) ![2TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD20EFRX - Image 5](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91LOX0pJJhL.jpg) ## Available Options This product comes in different **Size** options. ## Questions & Answers **Q: Silly question, these DON'T have to be used for NAS/RAID. Can be stand alone?** A: Not using mine for NAS or RAID. I have one in my desktop as the secondary drive and an NVME SSD as the primary. Mainly for all of my pictures, videos, and other large space consuming objects. I never turn my PC off so this HDD is ideal. 5400 vs 7200 is a non-issue in this configuration. FYI this drive uses CMR (Google it) which is FASTER than the SMR in a typical HDD desktop. **Q: how long is the warranty?** A: Western Digital will no longer honor the warranty on these devices. I just purchased 2 and WD indicated that they were sold in 2014 and the warranty has expired. I've contacted Amazon and asked them to remove the "3-year manufacturer's limited warranty" detail on this listing. WD even had me send them the Amazon invoice and pictures of the drives and still denied any warranty coverage when I tried to register them. **Q: Can you use this drive as a media storage in a HTPC but not necessarily in a NAS/Server configuration?** A: You could, but it's really designed for a NAS/Server setup!!! For a HTPC, I'd look at once of their Green Drives! The Green like the Red arn't the FAST HDD. They are slower, but for streaming Media in a HTPC type setup, that's what I would go with. It's slower, but it's more Energy Efficant and more quite and less heat. If you need the Speed of loading files up fast, the Black drive is the version to get. You can also go with a combination of a Black drive for all your normal programs, and a green drive for your Media. Even go with a 120 or 240 Gig SSD drive for Windows and a few programs, and have all your Media on a large 3TB Green drive!!! You don't need a fast HDD to stream Media!!! I have a NAS with 3 WB RED 3TB HDD installed in RAID 5 config for a total of 5.4TB of storage. I just built my new PC which I have 2 SSD drives installed, my older 120 Gig one and a almost new 240 Gig one. Plus 2 3TB HDD which are another brand, but basically Black drives. One I keep most of my software on and the other I use for Media Center. The 240 Gig SSD I use for Windows 7 and a few other programs I want to load quick, and my 120 Gig SSD I use for the PLEX Database files. It's a ton faster on a SSD then on a HDD even a fast HDD with the fastest SATA connection!!! I could of went with just a Green 3TB HDD for Media Center and it would have been just fine! I'm a Cable Cutter, so I record all my Broadcast TV channels using Media Center to play in any room in my house. Works out great and very flexable. Same with PLEX and using my ROKU boxes for that. I'm a huge user of PLEX. Ripping my huge Movie collection and putting it all on my NAS has been great. No more hunting around for the movie I want. I don't even have to get up. I can watch them in any room in the house and they look great. I take all my discs out of the cases toss the cases in the garbage and put the discs into CD/DVD Disc Binders. Ones that hold like 300 discs. It saves huge amounts of space. using PLEX, it's like my own personal Netflix service!!! Except no monthly fee's and it's all content I like. it also never comes and goes. There's none of that crap you have to skip or not allowed to skip before the movie like Movie Advertisements and FBI warnings, etc. All Gone, starts right up.I've been using my 3 WB 3TB Red drives for over a year now and have been problem free. My NAS shows zero errors. It's important for these things to run slower and produce less heat and be more energy efficient for what their intended use is for. That's for a Home or small business NAS! I have mine in my small Closet up on a top shelf with my other hardware. It can hold 4 drives and I currently have the 3 in it and down just just over 1 TB of space left so I'll be popping another drive in soon. maybe delete some other content. Let me tell you, those drives are packed together very close and in a small case with a single fan!!! It's a hot day out today. I don't have the AC on, the doors are open. My Netgear ReadyNAS is showing 38 degrees right now, my HDD are showing 38/39 Degrees, that's Celsius. So around 100/102 degree's F. It powers down to sleep mode when it's not used for 10 minutes. So another way to conserve power!!! I'm up to 11071 Power On hours and 17157 Start/Stop Count currently on #1 WB 3TB Red Drive. Still showing a ATA error count of 0. Just some of the stuff I can log into my NAS and look up simply. I got my first one at Newegg and the second one and third one here at Amazon back May 21 St, 2013.Again, there's a reason why WB is making different types, more Specialized HDD's!!!! If you're not going to put the RED into a NAS, I'd go with the Green drive instead. Still get the slower speed, Energy savings, less heat and less noise because they're running slower. Instead of 7200 RPM, they're around 5400 RPM. With faster speed like the black drive, well it requires more power, more power means more heat and more noise. But software loads up faster. So there's Pro's and Con's to anything and everything. You CAN use the RED, but really, if it's not going in a NAS, why would you want to? It has some extra features for use with a NAS, that the Green drive doesn't, but your PC is not going to use them like the NAS will. **Q: Is it possible to use this drive as a normal desktop drive for storage?** A: Yes, it is certainly possible. But there are tradeoffs to consider. This drive is designed for 24/7/365 operation, but is NOT designed for speed. If you want really fast access to your data (say, if you're a gamer or if you're doing CAD work) this isn't the best choice for your drive, and you'll be paying a lot for features you won't be using.In my own cases, I've been migrating my 5-bay Synology Network Attached Storage system from 3TB drives to 6TB drives. The older 3TB drives are NOT going to waste, however. I'm installing them into other systems, as "local software repositories" and the like. I'm not actually running any software off of them.Realistically, these drives are designed to run in RAID configurations (where the "striping" effect gives you plenty of speed, as you're reading and writing not to just one drive but multiple drives, dramatically reducing your wait time for "seeking" from any given drive. They are designed to spin constantly, at a pretty low power cost, versus standard desktop drives which are designed to spin up as you access them, and then spin down when you stop using them.If you want a fast desktop computer, your best bet is something along the lines of the WD "Black" line. If you want a cheaper "general purpose" drive, the WD "Blue" line is what you want. If you want a low-energy consumption drive (with significant performance compromises) you want the WD "Green" line. And if you're running a drive perpetually, in a RAID configuration, you want the WD "Red" line. (There's also an "enterprise drive" line which is designed for larger NAS applications which only make sense for large business server farms, but these are typically SAS-interface drives and can't really be used in a standard home application anyway.)I refer to the WD drive lines here, but Seagate and the other players in this market all do similar "tweaked versions."That last line is key. We're talking about what the drive is OPTIMIZED towards... what "tweaks" have been made to the hardware and the internal software (ie, "firmware").So... yes, you can run these in any system with the appropriate interface. Your system capabilities might limit the portion of the drive you can actually SEE (you may only see 2TB unless your system is pretty new)... that's not a shortcoming of the drive, it's a shortcoming of older hardware and, to a certain extent, older operating system variants. If your system can see 2TB+ drives, and has a SATA interface, you can use this drive.Whether you'd be better off with some other "tweaked and optimized" version is another story entirely, though. You're tossing away money buying one of these rather than a desktop-optimized drive (black, blue, or green) if you're just going to put it into a normal PC. ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Great drives *by D***E on February 24, 2015* Let's get this out of the way first, I'm kind of a WD fanboy but with good reason I think. I've been using them for as long as I can remember, and maybe it's just my personal luck but I think they've been better to me than any other brand. The only ones I don't really like are the Green drives, and I'm willing to accept that they are perfectly fine as external drives that aren't being constantly accessed. The Green is in mega power saving mode and loves to spin down, which means you're looking at longer access times and more wear and tear if you leave it plugged in and access it frequently. I wanted to punch my monitor every time I waited the magical 5 minutes (or whatever it is) before clicking on what I needed, just to wait several seconds on the drive to spin back up. I don't currently use NAS or RAID but considering my options this seemed like my best bet for frequently accessed mass storage, and I was at one point considering RAID (still am kind of). Black is "better," faster, and as such costs more, but I couldn't justify it since I have an SSD for things that need to be fast. I bought this 4TB Red to put in my computer and replace a 3TB Green external drive I was using. I've had it since August of 2014 which isn't that long at this point but it's given me zero reason to complain, same as the 3TB Red I bought in October to replace a 1TB Blue. The only thing I've noticed that was cause for concern at first is these things seem to be a little louder than your standard WD Blue or Green drive on read and write operations, and I thought I may have gotten one with a defect. I'm not sure why that is, but I was much less concerned about it when I got the second drive and it sounded about the same. They seem to have quietened down some with use, and again they have given me no issues whatsoever. I'll definitely be buying more of these when the time comes. UPDATE 6/30/2015 Just wanted to say I am still running a 4tb and a 3tb WD Red in my computer and they've been absolutely trouble free. One of them seems to make a short quiet buzzing noise every now and then that sounds out of place if you're used to diagnosing bad drives by sound like I've had to do on many occasions, but every test I've run comes up clean and I've had no issues whatsoever out of either drive. Chkdsk, SMART, and benchmarks are clean and consistent and I use these daily as "secondary" drives for all my storage and most of my games. I really can't recommend these highly enough. That being said, I always feel the need to tell people KEEP BACKUPS. Any drive can fail and it's always painful when it happens if you don't have regular backups. It's not cheap to match storage space for backups but trust me... That one day you need it -- and you will one day or one year unless you replace your drives regularly -- it's money well spent. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Best storage drive , NAS not required + professional Q & A podcast addressing RED drives | a great youtube video | *by J***S on June 4, 2015* I have been a long term western digital customer for over 10yrs. This drive is aimed and marketed at NAS type devices however also very good in a regular desktop computer system as a storage drive, which is how I am currently using it for my personal desktop system . I have owned this red drive for approx. 10 days now. The sustained transfer speed is very good. the lower / variable spindle speed compared to normal 7200RPM drives doesn't impact its performance for my use . It performs better then my 4TB WD green drive. My Red drive was installed in a computer with many hard drives and it runs at a cool 84F (29 C ) at idle, the lowest temp. drive in the computer. Also according to the Red drive spec sheet uses the least amount of power as well. Time limited error recovery (TLER) is one of the benefits for the Red drives , outlined in the youtube video podcast below. A popular weekly hardware video podcast with storage editor at PC Perspective ( pcper) Allyn Malventano addressing uses of red model drives: https://youtu.be/WjjCMWZ0aDU?t=51m I included a start time for later in the podcast @ 51 minutes, the start of discussion of WD red drives and its use in NAS and non NAS systems Some valuable info on NAS / RAID design can be found in this video as well. plus other general server hardware info is addressed. At time 55:40 in the the video more info and insight regarding DIY home NAS and RAID stability, reliability and design is discussed as well. Potentially saving a DIY person some pretty decent cash and at least some calories reading conflicting information online. All of which for some buyers reading reviews on amazon for this product would find useful or at least interesting. For me, my drives in my personal computer for this review are used for pure storage via Linux based operating systems. In some computer systems i've built are media servers, again using linux with LVM and sometimes MDADM , other times using RAID cards such as IBM M1015 , a cheaper version, of more expensive promise model cards with SAS. HGST is another maker of hard drives with good reputation and within the same general price range for some of their models, however western digital now owns them, formally Hitachi Global Storage Technologies . I've not taken the time while writing this to check if HGST drives feature some of the features the Red model line up offers. If you are going for a gaming system drive or require heavy I/O for a operating system drive, the red of course wouldn't be your best option. I use a WD Black drive, # WD3003FZEX for this . Steam games fill a drive quickly. With my budget and limited sata ports it makes a SSD fairly useless for storing games , or a media server gaming rig combo. Most of the time, once game is loaded , its mostly done , leaving the CPU and GPU left doing the work... . so for my needs esp dual booting , gaming on linux and windows using a Black model drive is my best option for my hardware , storage and requirements to have one type of operating system running most of the time. I do sometimes run Linux on a stand alone 120GB SSD , if I disconnect my optical drive , smaller ssd drives are quite inexpensive now and do make life a bit easier esp on aging desktop hardware. The cost per TB in a black model is still quite low for the performance level and the only high performance drive to offer a 5 year warranty standard. Especially when compared to a hybrid model drives cost and other drive makers of fast mechanical and hybrid solutions. Heavy gaming via steam would make a hybrid drives nand cache not very effective , fairly quickly iirc . Hopefully some of this info will prove useful , or at least give some starting ground to look into , research options deeper that may not have been considered before. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Regular consumer drives in RAID are accident waiting to happen *by G***N on August 20, 2012* Here is a quote from a review at pcper.com I'm going to let the cat out of the bag right here and now. Everyone's home RAID is likely an accident waiting to happen. If you're using regular consumer drives in a large array, there are some very simple (and likely) scenarios that can cause it to completely fail. I'm guilty of operating under this same false hope - I have an 8-drive array of 3TB WD Caviar Greens in a RAID-5. For those uninitiated, RAID-5 is where one drive worth of capacity is volunteered for use as parity data, which is distributed amongst all drives in the array. This trick allows for no data loss in the case where a single drive fails. The RAID controller can simply figure out the missing data by running the extra parity through the same formula that created it. This is called redundancy, but I propose that it's not. Since I'm also guilty here with my huge array of Caviar Greens, let me also say that every few weeks I have a batch job that reads *all* data from that array. Why on earth would I need to occasionally and repeatedly read 21TB of data from something that should already be super reliable? Here's the failure scenario for what might happen to me if I didn't: * Array starts off operating as normal, but drive 3 has a bad sector that cropped up a few months back. This has gone unnoticed because the bad sector was part of a rarely accessed file. * During operation, drive 1 encounters a new bad sector. * Since drive 1 is a consumer drive it goes into a retry loop, repeatedly attempting to read and correct the bad sector. * The RAID controller exceeds its timeout threshold waiting on drive 1 and marks it offline. * Array is now in degraded status with drive 1 marked as failed. * User replaces drive 1. RAID controller initiates rebuild using parity data from the other drives. * During rebuild, RAID controller encounters the bad sector on drive 3. * Since drive 3 is a consumer drive it goes into a retry loop, repeatedly attempting to read and correct the bad sector. * The RAID controller exceeds its timeout threshold waiting on drive 3 and marks it offline. * Rebuild fails. At this point the way forward varies from controller to controller, but the long and short of it is that the data is at extreme risk of loss. There are ways to get it all back (most likely without that one bad sector on drive 3), but none of them are particularly easy. Now you may be asking yourself how enterprises run huge RAIDs and don't see this sort of problem? The answer is Time Limited Error Recovery - where the hard drive assumes it is part of an array, assumes there is redundancy, and is not afraid to quickly tell the host controller that it just can't complete the current I/O request. Here's how that scenario would have played out if the drives implemented some form of TLER: * Array starts off operating as normal, but drive 3 has developed a bad sector several weeks ago. This went unnoticed because the bad sector was part of a rarely accessed file. * During operation, drive 1 encounters a new bad sector. * Drive 1 makes a few read attempts and then reports a CRC error to the RAID controller. * The RAID controller maps out the bad sector, locating it elsewhere on the drive. The missing sector is rebuilt using parity data from the other drives in the array. *Array continues normal operation, with the error added to its event log. The above scenario is what would play out with an Areca RAID controller (I've verified this personally). Other controllers may behave differently. A controller unable to do a bad sector remap might have just marked drive 1 as bad, but the key is that the rebuild would be much less likely to fail as drive 3 would not drop completely offline once the controller ran into the additional bad sector. The moral of this story is that typical consumer grade drives have data error timeouts that are far longer than the drive offline timeout of typical RAID controllers, and without some form of TLER, two bad sectors (totaling 1024 bytes) is all that's required to put multiple terabytes of data in grave danger. The Solution: The solution should be simple - just get some drives with TLER. The problem is that until now those were prohibitively expensive. Enterprise drives have all sorts of added features like accelerometers and pressure sensors to compensate for sliding in and out of a server rack while operating, as well as dealing with rapid pressure changes that take place when the server room door opens and the forced air circulation takes a quick detour. Those features just aren't needed in that home NAS sitting on your bookshelf. What *is* needed is a WD Caviar Green that has TLER, and Western Digital delivers that in their new Red drives. End quote and back to reviewer. I've got 5 of these in a Synology DiskStation 5-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage (DS1512+) . It is really a sweet setup. The Synology software has a S.M.A.R.T. test that can do surface scans to detect bad sectors. I have their Quick Test check every disk daily and the Extended Test set to automatically run on each of the 5 disks every weekend. (The Extended Test takes about 5 hours per disk so I separate the tests by 12 hours.) ## Frequently Bought Together - Western Digital 2TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD20EFRX - Synology 2-Bay DiskStation DS224+ (Diskless) --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.tn/products/431655-2tb-wd-red-plus-nas-internal-hard-drive-hdd-5400](https://www.desertcart.tn/products/431655-2tb-wd-red-plus-nas-internal-hard-drive-hdd-5400) --- *Product available on Desertcart Tunisia* *Store origin: TN* *Last updated: 2026-06-03*