The Western Digital 8TB WD Red Plus (WD80EFZZ) is the gold standard for anyone building or upgrading a home or small-office Network Attached Storage (NAS). This drive gives you the one thing you absolutely need for a multi-bay system: reliability through CMR technology, without the deafening noise or excessive heat of a full-speed enterprise drive. Why I Highly Recommend the WD Red Plus: CMR is Non-Negotiable: The "Plus" designation means this drive uses Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR). This is crucial for multi-drive (RAID) systems. Unlike the SMR (Shingled) drives, CMR maintains consistent write speeds, which prevents the painful performance slowdowns and potential array failures during parity checks or rebuilds. Built for 24/7 Reliability: With a 180 TB/year workload rating and 1,000,000 hour MTBF, this drive is engineered to run constantly. You can trust it with your photos, backups, and Plex media library. Quiet and Cool (5640 RPM): The 5640 RPM speed class is a perfect compromise. It is noticeably quieter and cooler than the 7200 RPM Pro drives, which is vital if your NAS sits in a home office or bedroom. NASware 3.0 Firmware: This exclusive firmware is baked in to improve drive compatibility, reduce issues in a RAID environment, and help with error recovery (TLER). It truly is plug-and-play with Synology, QNAP, and custom builds running TrueNAS. A Note on Performance: Don't let the 5640 RPM number fool you; this drive still delivers excellent real-world speeds for network streaming and backups (user tests often show sustained speeds around 180-200MB/s). If you need absolute max speed, look at the Red Pro line, but be prepared for more noise and heat. For a general-purpose, always-on home NAS, this is the superior choice. Final Verdict: If data integrity and quiet operation are priorities for your 8-bay or smaller NAS, the WD80EFZZ is the drive to buy. It's the perfect mix of price, performance, and peace of mind. Read more
Ah, the WD 14TB Red Plus — a hard drive so large, it made me question why I even have a social life when I could be collecting data like a paranoid government agency. 14 terabytes. That’s 14,000 gigabytes. Or roughly enough space to download every movie you’ve never watched, and backup your regrets — in HD. This drive is purpose-built for NAS systems, which is tech-speak for “I take my data hoarding very seriously.” It spins at a gentle 5400 RPM, because who needs speed when you’ve got volume? It’s like the cargo ship of hard drives — it’s not fast, but it will carry absolutely everything you own and a few things you don’t remember saving. Installation was easy. I slid it into my NAS, and it immediately whispered, “Feed me data.” It’s quiet, reliable, and gives off the comforting hum of “yes, your digital life is safe here… for now.” Of course, at this price, your wallet might scream louder than the drive ever will. But can you really put a price on peace of mind, uninterrupted Plex streaming, or hoarding family photos you'll never organize? Would I recommend it? Oh, absolutely — if you're building a NAS, launching a startup, or planning to store humanity’s knowledge in your basement. If not? Maybe stick to Google Drive and denial. Read more
As a power user running a home NAS system, I need both speed and reliability from my hard drives. After putting this 8TB WD Red Plus model to the test, I'm thoroughly impressed on both fronts! Using `hdparm` to benchmark, I recorded read speeds exceeding 185 MB/sec when connected directly via SATA. That's faster than Western Digital's claimed speed and almost double what I get from older drives. Transfers and backups take half the time! ++++ hdparm -t --direct /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 558 MB in 3.01 seconds = 185.50 MB/sec ++++ In addition to the great performance, this drive runs cool and quiet in my NAS enclosure thanks to the 5400RPM rotational speed. And it's designed for 24/7 operation, giving me confidence in its longevity and reliability under constant use. With 8TB capacity, I've got plenty of headroom for backups, media storage, and archiving important files while still leaving space to grow. And the CMR technology means maximum compatibility with my NAS RAID. For home and small office NAS setups that demand a perfect blend of high capacity, sustained performance, cool operation and proven reliability, the WD Red Plus line is a winner. This drive meets my needs perfectly! Read more
I have been running a NAS in my house for the past 6 years. It runs 24/7 connected to a UPS in case of power failure. I have used a combination of these WD Red drives and Seagate Iron Wolf drives over the years. Not once has one of these drives failed! I upgrade to larger drives as my storage fills up, but most of the drives I have removed had 30-40 thousand hours on them. For a mechanical device, that is a long time. Through the NAS interface I can monitor the temperature of the drives and these run slightly cooler than the Seagate drives, but beyond that are comparable. They both run quiet and play nice with Synology's operating system. In my opinion the quality of these drives in comparison to what you might find in an external drive is worth the extra money. The peace of mind of knowing the drive is high quality and my data stored on it is safe is priceless. The cost of these seem to vary quite a bit. At the lowest price I've seen of about $120 for 8tb they're a bargain. I'm not sure I would pay $160 for one, but they go on sale regularly. Read more
